Urgent Talk- &/&&

Urgent Talk are a three-piece band from Sheffield with a synth, a drum machine, a guitar, bit of boy-girl vocals and a violin, and they’ve recently released these two EPs, & and &&. This adds up to just over 36 minutes of music, and there is no major qualitative difference between the two so its tempting to think of them as two sides of an album, and to be honest that’s how I’ve been listening to them, but it’s also nice to think of Urgent Talk as a really fresh and new band who haven’t put out their full-length debut yet, so I guess what they’ve really managed to do is find a really neat way to have their cake and eat it too huh.But it’s a cake we can all enjoy, because both EPs are really, really incredibly good! Urgent Talk are a pop band, of sorts, I guess, I mean I call most music I like ‘pop’ even when it isn’t really because it’s just a much better word than ‘indie’ and stuff but”¦ well you might call them a ‘noise-pop’ band because live they are very loud, particularly the drums and synths, but this doesn’t quite translate in the same way on record. Regardless, there is a fair-sized abrasive undercurrent to their songs, particularly on the likes of ‘Ampersands’, and also in the way they sort of jump around and stuff, with little builds in the middle and stuff which unfurl like streams of consciousness”¦ or maybe that’s just a product of the particular sort of franticness that Warren Myles’s voice has, I don’t know. But basically, if you love synths as much as me, then there is no way you can’t love this band, because they’re an absolutely amazing band for synths. The rave-y stylings on ‘We Are Keyfabe’ and ‘The Halogen Key’ provide intensely direct evidence of that for absolutely everyone, even people who haven’t seen their live show.But probably the best songs are when Urgent Talk do something a little more tender. ‘We Love Our Network’, for example, is the sparsest and loveliest thing here, “good morning scarecrow eyes” (just one of many great and slightly obtuse bits of lyricism).  ‘Air Conditioning Politics’, meanwhile, is fucking epic, building forever on coos and throbbing saw tones until exploding into “I love you still”¦ the steepest learning curve.” Even before I got these EPs, I’d been playing it obsessively off their myspace player for weeks. I would say these were “definitely” the best songs, but then you also have ‘Winter Olympiad’ at the end of && which is the most directly confrontational and also itself one of the best.Urgent Talk are therefore a noisy, energetic, (arguable) pop band with everything going for them. They are, in short, incredible. Go buy these records and also go see Urgent Talk live. I am only going to give one score because there is nothing separating the quality of the two EPs at all. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next with open eyes because Urgent Talk’s existence is definitely a massive win for the universe. 84%Urgent Talk on MySpace