Dr John C Taylor’s Chronophage Clock eats time. It slows down, it speeds up. Sometimes it stops completely. It’s a huge golden disk, swirling and numberless, with a giant grasshopper sat on top. To be honest, it’s pretty fucking ugly. Yet as a physical invocation of “Relative Time” — the notion that an hour in good company flies by, but a minute of pain will seem endless — it’s almost perfect.
Hookworms are very good company, and, for a brief minute on a walk around the National Museum of Scotland last weekend, “In Our Time” mapped onto the Clock’s circling profundity with a strange precision. I know, it’s horrifically pretentious to wander around museums in headphones, trying to find odd hybrids of music and spectacle, but I can’t help enjoying it. You should try it some time.
I probably brushed sleeves with these Hookworms lads on some similar wander, back in the day, staring-out the distortion pedal section at one of Leeds’ many tiny, inexplicably terrifying, music shops. While my teenage pounds went towards the packaging labeled “METAL” and “MORE METAL,” they were eyeing each other across the shop; one testing the screeching frequencies of a battery powered mini-amp, the other asking a bewildered shop assistant for something “you know… cavernous?” Luckily, they found a rhythm section who don’t so much drive as stall, a steady call for calm in the sometimes overly frantic world of “psych,” and the internet erupted in a tide of not particularly astute Spacemen 3 comparisons.
Paired with “The Correspondent,” the band’s tune on Sonic Cathedral’s tricolour 3D compilation from Dec 2012, Psych for Sore Eyes, “In Our Time” provides an addictive force for expectation, stretching further than any SoundCloud timer: new album Pearl Mystic comes out February 25.
• Hookworms: http://hookworms.bandcamp.com
• Gringo Records: http://www.gringorecords.com
More about: Hookworms
