If you can remember the late 80s then you probably wish you weren’t there. Kieran Hebden and William Tyler’s debut album together, 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s, is an exercise in memory that begs the question: what fannish interests from that period would you like to hang onto and what would you rather forget? And even if you hide those embarrassing brief compulsions and fads away retrospectively, did they shape you any less? Hebden and Tyler go excavating a shared past on different continents on 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s, with the influences for this album turning out to be a surprise.
After crossing paths in 2013, the pair struck up an email friendship and discovered a clandestine devotion to country music that connected both of them to their fathers. Tyler’s journey through all things Americana might imply he was the driver of this project, though it was in fact Hebden who initiated and arranged much of the material. The influential Four Tet musician would listen to Lyle Lovett with his father back in Putney in the late 80s, years before most people had heard of the country musician here in the UK (that would all change when he married Julia Roberts in 1993, instigating a vile tabloid feeding frenzy).
If Tyler’s instinct invariably is to veer towards the experimental then here, against his better judgement, he leans into simplicity at the suggestion of the producer – it’s a suggestion that pays off, adding to the emotional rush. It’s nostalgic and yet it remains forward-thinking, with the removal of egos enabling the easy flow of ideas that seep through these seven beatific tracks. ‘If I Had A Boat’, an instrumental cover of a Lovett song that could best be described as an interpretation, floods through the net curtains and pings off the woodchip, before the guitar picking takes us out into the sunshine. That eleven-minute exposition feels almost like a companion piece to their first offering, 2023’s ‘Darkness, Darkness’, the yang to its yin or the morning after the night before.
Here, there’s an open-hearted embrace of the guitar that’s unusual on records made by electronic musicians; the sound of strings reverberating in the hollow body gives this record its soul, contrary to so much electronic music that rejects the physicality of the six string. Moreover, harmonics – the last refuge of the acoustic guitar-playing scoundrel – are employed throughout, though Hebden is able to weave them into the textures so that they never come across as cloying or overly manipulative.
On ‘Spider Ballad’, the harmonics and the electronics are masterfully blended so subtly that their interplay is barely noticeable. On the more overt ‘When It Rains’, there are even hints of, whisper it, soloing (hammer offs, fingered vibrato), which is saved from the fire by a deluge of feedback at the conclusion of the track. Perhaps the main strength of 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s is that these songs rarely turn out to be what you thought they might be, which is a fairly on the nose metaphor for life itself – especially viewed 35 years later through the distorted prism of the 2020s.
