Hookworms are a Leeds band but the new Pigeon Detectives/Kaiser Chiefs they are not. In fact, to prove the point, Julian Cope – less a fan of bumptious indie than freakbeat, psych and krautrock – has been colourfully extolling the virtues of the five-piece's debut EP, calling it "an epic 26 minutes of sub-Zabriskie Point ambient road-movie heat haze-on-the-road sonic wipeout of the post-Loop variety" and praising the "dronehead guitars" which are, he considers, "designed to plateau then rise then plateau then rise, on and on and fucking on". Finally, he decides, they're the shoegazing Lynyrd Skynyrd, which is quite a claim, but what the hell, this is Julian Cope, and this is freakbeat.
Well, the interzone between freakbeat, psych, kosmische, space-rock and whatever the phrase is that neatly captures the atmosphere of a band intent on some serious wigged-out jamming. We don't really get the allusion to shoegaze, although to be fair this stuff is closer to that sort of fx-laden guitar daze action than it is, say, to the laddish neo-Britpop of the Pigeon Detectives. Hookworms, who formed in 2009 and only want to be known by their initials, use two guitars, bass, drums and keyboardsocalquencers to create a series of slow-building wah-wah-scapes that variously reference the psychedelic forays of late-60s London and Los Angeles as well as the krautrock experiments of early-70s Cologne, Dusseldorf and Munich.
More than anything or anyone, they remind us of those late-80s purveyors of garage-infused drone-psych, Loop and Spacemen 3, as well as Pete Kember's Spectrum, Jason Pierce's Spiritualized, and early Verve. Teen Dreams, one of the tracks – and these are tracks, not songs, wild feats of wanton extemporising, even though they are, length-wise, models of concision, coming in as they do at between five and eight minutes – features a motorik pulse, organ shimmer, and declamatory vocals that offer the impression of someone yelping in tongues, a conduit for demented forces. Medicine Cabinet is aptly named because it sounds as though they've been raiding one. I Have Some Business Out West is based on a guitar figure that approximates the filthy rev of a motorbike engine, and Resolution is loose, but with a structure, if that's not a contradiction in terms. We've heard some of their live set from the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds and it is very Spacemen 3/Loop, from that era when nouveau longhair hippie-rockers reclaimed the alternative scene from the clean-cut anti-rockist new pop kids of the early 80s. It's untamed, untrammelled stuff, not "tight", with none of those exigencies for economy or precision. It lasts for 30 minutes although it could have gone on for 30 hours or 30 days: the effect – trippy, immersive – would have been the same. Careful with that axe, EG.