It's New To Me: Out to Sea by Brighter (2006)

Photo illustration from an advertisement for the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, 1938

Part of the UK indie-pop scene in the late '80s and early '90s, the band Brighter is often dismissively referred to as "like the Field Mice". That's actually a pretty fair comparison, considering the band's sound and the songwriting style of Keris Howard, but there's a lot nice things to find in the Brighter discography. Thanks to Matinee Recordings, the band's entire 35-song discography is available (pretty cheaply) on two collections - lately, I've been listening to the second of these collections, Out to Sea. This collection is actually an expanded version of Brighter's only long-form release, the eight-song mini-album Laurel. Out to Sea begins with the full version of Laurel, including a couple outtakes, and then appends two singles and a bunch of unreleased songs at the end. All together, this forms a one-hour collection of very nice (if kind of anemic and twee) indie-pop.

Laurel is an interesting release, and it's hard to know how I'd have experienced it on its own at the time of its release. The mini-album begins with two entirely guitar and vocals songs, "Christmas" and "Frostbite" - Brighter never had a drummer, but these songs are particularly delicate and gauzy, making for an inauspicious and insubstantial opening gambit. It pays off, though, as more sounds get added to the mix as Laurel progresses - the icy piano stabs of "Summer Becomes Winter" really catch the ear, and when the muted overdriven guitar strumming come in halfway through "Ocean Sky", it might as well be thunderous riffage in how starkly it contrasts with what came before. "Ocean Sky" also introduces the drum machine, which is a key component in Brighter's uptempo numbers. Oddly, the mini-album kind of trails off with its closing tracks, but the patient adding and subtracting of sounds makes it an interesting listen, and Keris Howard's wide-open and decidedly non-virtuoso singing style makes for a nice focal point in these arrangements. The two outtakes from the Laurel sessions are the excellent upbeat pop songs "If I Could See" and "Wallflower" - they could have been included to turn the mini-album Laurel into a solid and more varied full-length album. I guess this just wasn't what Brighter had in mind.

After the Laurel section of the collection, Out to Sea delivers the equally interesting "singles" section with the "A Winter's Tale" and "Next Summer" flexi-singles. These singles, particularly their strong a-sides, present a more immediate and hook-oriented version of Brighter - Keris Howard has said that he didn't know whether Brighter should be a new Sea Urchins or a low rent My Bloody Valentine, and you can hear both inclinations on fuzzy pop songs like "Next Summer" and "Looks Like Rain". Interestingly, some of the strongest tracks on Out to Sea are unreleased tracks at the end of the collection, recorded a few months before the Laurel sessions - I wonder why none of these songs saw release at the time. In particular, the pair of "There Is Nothing We Can Do?" and "Nothing at All" (cheekily presented back to back here) are as strong as anything else the band recorded. I like being able to ingest an interesting artist's whole oeuvre in one shot, so grabbing the whole Brighter discography at a bargain price really paid off.

"If I Could See" by Brighter