Spiral Girl –  Klammer (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

You have to admire a band’s dedication to its audience when they break into your house at night, rummage through your record collection, leaving as dawn breaks with the place as tidy as they found it and then use that covertly acquired information to write music which encapsulates the best of those sonic delights fashioned into something totally new. It can be the only answer, how else could they come up with a song that sounds so perfectly in tune with the music that constantly plays in the back of my head…not to mention my living room.

Bass lines straight out of classic era New Model Army, the power and confidence of a Dave Vanian vocal delivery, guitars that shimmer with the Mission’s dark arabesque and chimes with Kevin Walker’s gothic dreamscapes. For anyone whose 80’s experience was standing in a muddy field watching live bands whilst wearing a “Coal not Dole” tee-shirt rather than the day-glo pop image we have since been sold, this is the perfect time machine back to their formative years. To everyone younger it is a slice of what you missed out on. But now you don’t have to miss out and I don’t have to just dream of the past, with bands like Klammer making records such as this gem,  a dark and brooding musical renaissance could be just around the corner. Imagine….