There’s a ghost in the Leslie speaker. You can hear it on ‘Wildly Remote’, that blurred, rotor-smeared guitar tone fraying at the edges like a tape played too many times, dissolving the boundary between the song’s warm intimacy and something older, colder, and genuinely uncanny.
All Clouds Bring Not Rain is the second album from Memorials, the duo born out of two of the more quietly canonical acts in British underground music: Electrelane and Wire. The territory they cover is vast, traversed with the ease of people who have earned their passport stamps. It sits downstream of the Canterbury continuum; Kosmische drift bleeds into Stockhausen abstraction; Tangerine Dream sequencers into Radiophonic static, bleeps and bloops that feel lifted from a forgotten BBC education programme.
Lullabies give way to what Can might have sounded like had they been raised on Alice Coltrane: ’Mediocre Demon’ is Coltrane’s spiritual jazz in collision with the hypnotic orchestral fade-outs of Melody Nelson, a piece of music that dissolves its own edges and challenges you to find where it ends. ‘Dropped Down the Well’ moves from one cosmology to another like someone crossing a room calmly while the building falls around them. Verity Susman’s voice – folky, floating, Nico-adjacent but warmer, less armoured – carries heartbreak and utopia simultaneously and without apparent effort.
Elsewhere, you catch something that might be the Shaggs if the Shaggs had been produced by Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew: an ecstatic naivety rerouted through controlled chaos, innocent and inexhaustible at once. The closest cultural analogue might be an Adam Curtis documentary that actually has answers rather than just an increasingly elaborate set of problems. There’s also an Electrelane DNA to the way these songs move. Susman learned in Electrelane that a song earns its quiet moments by knowing when to end them. Here, soft passages don’t linger past their usefulness, pastoral psych detonates on cue, and the krautrockian repetition builds until it has to break.
The bass is outrageous throughout, up there with the best of Stereolab’s motorik low-end, which is to say somewhere between structural engineering and pure sensory pleasure. On ‘I Can’t See a Rainbow’ it becomes almost the point, a gravitational centre around which the record’s more exploratory impulses orbit. There’s a grandeur here, too, that recalls Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul in its sense of scale, a feeling that the instrumentation has somewhere important to be and a rocket up its engine to get there.
By the time ‘Holy Invisible’ closes proceedings, David Axelrod’s ghost has arrived uninvited and made himself entirely at home: those vast, morally weighted orchestrations, that sense of a soul genuinely in motion. It is a cinematic album in the way that the best cinematic albums are: not scored to imaginary pictures but possessed of an inner light that makes images unnecessary. It feels like a proper album, shaped and considered and irreducible. It builds its world so gradually that by the time you understand what you’re hearing, you are already inside it. The record proceeds by this logic of inversion and complement, each section illuminating its opposite, the way shadows define light or how silence shapes the sound around it.
What the hauntologists of an earlier decade promised, and rarely delivered, was not grief for lost futures but their actual continuation. All Clouds Bring Not Rain does exactly that: music rooted in the English landscape and simultaneously reaching toward the stars, parochial and infinite, intimate and vast. It sounds, somehow, like a record from the 1960s that nobody made. Not because it sounds retro, but because it has the self-evidence of something that should always have existed.
