When asked in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the famously opinionated Liam Gallagher (formerly of Brit Rock stars Oasis) said this about music he was digging lately: “Do you know that track by alt-J, ‘Left Hand Free’? That is a great track. But alt-J can fuck right off as far as I’m concerned. It’s a great tune, and I paid 79 pence for it, but I am in no way a fan of alt-J.” Why doesn’t he like his fellow Britons? “I don’t know. One of them’s got a mustache, and that’s unacceptable.”
Gallagher’s ever-curious logic aside, he’s right about one thing — “Left Hand Free,” from alt-J’s second album, 2014’s This Is All Yours, is a great track. It’s also perhaps no coincidence that it’s the most straightforwardly rocking song on an album full of atmospheric oddities. The very next song, “Garden of England,” with its spare flute and birds chirping, sounds like something Gallagher might says was concocted by a bunch of arty “wussies.”
Speaking of which, alt-J formed at Leeds University in 2007, each of its four members studying one artistic medium or another. The quartet’s 2012 debut, An Awesome Wave, won Britain’s esteemed Mercury Prize, something that helped expand alt-J’s reach exponentially and drew comparisons to Radiohead’s more sonically adventurous late-period.
“Hunger of the Pine” might be the most satisfying thing on This Is All Yours — five minutes of shifting dynamics that combine textured electronics and throbbing rhythms with intimate, interweaving vocals and insistent horns. Call it the Radiohead-esque cousin (think Kid A era) to the more populist leaning, Oasis-like “Left Hand Free,” an illustration of alt-J’s sonic versatility.
