Vehicle rewire guitar pop history on modern eccentric single “Escalators”

“‘Escalators’ is a song that exists in its own imaginary musical landscape,” says Michael Cable, lead singer of the rising rock band. Doubling down, “Our music rejects most of the dominant British indie music of the past 20 years, and lives in an alternate reality where only our influences exist. I don’t think any good band writes with anybody else in mind.”

The wrung-out humor, the insistence that everything stopped being good in the world right around when they were born, and the sniffing at the idea of fitting the norm; it’s all adding up to sound quite like a modern British band that very much fits the norm. With “Escalators”, or any of Vehicle’s work, however, the contrarian claims quickly meet reality.

“Escalators” is, while warming the ears with a crumbly and familiar nostalgia, a bit of a misfit wherever it may roam. There’s the unmetered, newborn demo quality to its loose pacing. The background corrugated metal ruffle, sounding like a scene in 1986’s Labyrinth, where Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah Williams is swimming through an antique junkyard. Then there’s rusted neon guitar lines that believably emulate the erratic blinking of faulty Christmas tree lights; the punkish vocals clearly sung with an iron grip on the microphone. Still, for a song with individual parts all pitching their own separate fit, the result is shockingly coherent and, in spite of itself, adaptably modern.

According to Cable, Vehicle’s influences are scattered throughout time and location. Though in live performance, he hopes, the band sounds like they would “go down well after The Beatles at the Star-Club in 1962.” Cable elaborates on the track’s integrated smattering of past and present influences. “If we were to perfect the sound with solely vintage equipment,” he says, “we might end up in the revivalist camp, and we’re not interested in that – the songs are also brought up to date by the words. ‘Escalators’ can definitely be taken in this way. It’s our attempt at a classic guitar pop song, but it’s about a very modern sense of chaos.”

“There’s a weight to our playing that we would have to remove if we were blatant revivalists,” he elaborates, pointedly. “The collaging of many different corners of guitar music takes you out of that trap.” According to Cable, the collaging strategy keeps the band referentially scattered throughout time and location. Their music owes as much to 1940s and 1950s jazz standards, as to “Flying Nun guitar bands.”

But they have also absorbed, and somewhat embrace, sonic glimmers of the 21st century: “Due to the point we’re at with technology, you can go off on one emulating the production of your favourite deep cuts before you’ve acquired a decent shit detector. So you get a lot of modern stuff that relies solely on its references to make it interesting. I’m aware there’s a lot of sonic influences in the Vehicle pot that are crucial to the sound, but they all come secondary to the importance of hooks, melodies and lyrics.”

While preaching on marrying the old with the new, Cable repeatedly mentioned the usefulness of up-to-date songwriting. “Escalators”, for instance, contrasts a sort of rockabilly bull-riding jolt with a forthright and clipped foldout of lyrics. In dismantling my impression that Vehicle leant toward a revivalist philosophy, “However,” Cable continues, “in a pre-internet age, I might have fallen through the cracks. I might’ve been a mystic burglar or someone who hung around with private detectives.”

“I wouldn’t have been interested in music; having grown up with the internet, I was radicalised by live videos of The Monks and The Jesus and Mary Chain interviews at just the right age to steer me into the corners we inhabit now, so I must bear that in mind.”