Not everything's lost. Bands like Mew have emerged, they still believe music doesn't need to be safe and can be brave end emotional. In the electronic field, the Fidget house explosion of the last couple of years brought us artists like AC Slater, Costello and Udachi, which I still regard as the biggest genius of this century so far.
The first truly great debut album in guitar music comes from Barnsley, halfway between Leeds and Sheffield.
Lyca Sleep were a band with a fantastic guitarist called Rob Marshall.
Perfectly balanced between post-shoegazing soundscapes and actual tunes, he's much more than a disciple of The Verve's early Nick McCabe, counting only that inspiration doesn't do justice to his immense talent. That band didn't go beyond a couple of singles, Dan Cutts wasn't a bad singer, as he proved in his following releases both solo and with new band Two Skies.
But when Lyca Sleep became Exit Calm with new singer Nicky Smith they found the most amazing voice since Kurt Cobain. His voice can be rough and delicate and is the perfect match for Marshall's guitar.
With two enormous talents like these, Exit Calm built a feverish and loyal fanbase. Recordings of both demos and live performances started circulating increasing the interest on the web.
So it comes as a disappointment at least three of their best songs aren't actually included on the album, and one of them is the first single, Higher Learning. God knows what went through their heads when compiling the track list for the album... and yet this album, even with those songs missing, is easily miles above any other debut album released in the last decade. Extremely emotional songs like You've Got It All Wrong (a call to arms opening the album with a long guitar intro), When You Realise (starting all delicate just to explode halfway into a noise hurricane), Forgiveness, With Angels and Recovery (all featuring wonderful melodies and sounds from the guitar and the best vocals you've heard in a long time), plus much loved second and third singles We're On Our Own and Hearts And Minds and the touching acoustic beauty of closing track Serenity... well, these songs are more than enough to define this as an absolute masterpiece and the best debut album of this century (if you count Gabrielles Wish as debuting in the 90s with two EPs and a delayed album).
A band to follow, they make you believe in todays music, again.
