News Hourglass Sea

Growing up with any guitar scene, it’s difficult to know what you really like and what you’ve simply been drawn in by: is it the catchy guitar riff that you’re in love with or is the fact that NME have turned the band members into larger than life demi gods whose every move seems to have enormous importance and significance? The difference is even harder to make out for anyone who has grown away from a musical ‘hub’ – and though Bradford may only be an hour or so away from Manchester and Leeds, it almost feels like another dimension.

Hourglass Sea comes from those same Yorkshire wilds, a city so musically desolate that the first hit for ‘Bradford music’ generally comes up with a link to something Deerhunter related. It seems that if Dean Bentley, the man behind the project, ever had to wrestle a mild interest in indie, the landfill certainly lost. In its absence, Bentley has managed to piece together a series of tracks that keep their production values ludicrously high, especially considering they were likely made on a budget lower than what most people spend on a daily paper.

The inspiration behind the music seems rooted in that bizarre, neon time that signified the late 80’s and early 90’s, utilising soaring guitars as well as samples from Street Fighter to flesh out the shimmering electro that is its core. The internet is awash with bedroom producers all doing something vaguely similar, and this retro-tinged element is a running theme – overindulged middle class twenty-somethings yearning for their lost childhood perhaps – but this is done without cliché and, remarkably, without stepping on the toes of any contemporaries. Where Star Slinger looks towards J Dilla for inspiration and Washed Out searches for new ways to apply reverb, Hourglass Sea is all about adding another layer of polish to an already glimmering racket.

Live From The Creamatorium EP by Hourglass Sea