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fotos:
Les Inrockuptibles.
."Solved" (Virgin CD
Single) Released 27th April Softly
softly opening slice of graceful folk pop from
forthcoming classic album 'Almost There'. Positively sprightly compared
to 'Stone' and 'Higher Than Reason' but still gliding through
a blizzard of gentle melancholy; a complex tapestry of softly chiming
guitars and the discreet hum of Farfisa organ build to
a subtle crescendo, underpinning Andy Yorke's crystal-perfect, sad at the
world vocals. More than just a taster for next month's album, 'Solved'
comes armed with a sublime selection of b-sides , best of the
bunch being a reworking of mighty long-lost heroes of sadness
and beauty, Hugo Largo's 'Never Mind'. (Ian Chesterton.
NIGHTSHIFT) The album Almost Here is out on Monday
11 May 1998.
Back Beat BBC1 Unbelievable Truth - Almost
Here (Virgin) by Nigel Packer A new Yorke arrives on the scene in
the form of Thom's younger brother Andy - frontman with this Oxford
3-piece. It's a nicely understated debut with thoughtful acoustic
sound and a handful of top tunes scattered throughout. Andy
has a quietly compelling voice, shown off to best effect on the lilting
closer Be Ready. And on this evidence it's safe to say he's well
qualified to join the family business.
Almost Here (Virgin)
Surprising, haunting debut from a Radiohead relative.
You don't have to say it loud - or long - to mean
it. Not something the guiding lights of the 'alternative' rock world have
heeded over the last year, with its 75-minute albums and three-part symphony
singles. All of which makes Unbelievable Truth's debut something of an
antidote. Grand gestures don't get a look in. All we have here is a bruised
melancholy gently wafting through a dozen songs short on drama, but definitely
long on spirit and emotion.
UT have been together some four years - a situation
that shouldn't be lost on those who claim they've only been signed because
of singer Andy Yorke's genetic links to a certain man-of-the-moment, his
brother Thom - and have honed their sound, creating a water-tight atmosphere
of beautiful melancholy. If UT have any links to Radiohead, it's the Radiohead
of campfire-circle acoustic moments like 'High & Dry'. To his credit,
Andy doesn't ape Thom's vocals, even if the odd stadium-stopping shriek
occasionally emerges. The atmosphere is more redolent of the gentle unease
that coursed through Crowded House's 'Together Alone', snapshots that shiver
with the ghostly recollections of childhood memories. There's an ache in
Yorke's voice, allied to the hesitant, fragile melodies, that moves so
much of this album to minor-chord majesty.
Former single 'Higher Than Reason' paints a pretty
accurate picture of the band's strengths, with its sad jangling guitars
pattering like rain on a window pane, but the highlight is 'Settle Down',
Yorke and drummer Nigel Powell's voices entwined around chiming guitars
and swooning Hammond swirls. Almost as beautiful are the murky menace of
'Forget About Me', and the creeping strum of 'Angel', sounding like a far-off
thunderstorm threatening to break.
'The Bends Part II' it certainly isn't; it's a gem,
an album that moves you not with muscle but with a murmur. *****
Stephen Dowling (VOX Magazine)
....
Planet Sound - Interview with Unbelievable Truth
by Stephen Eastwood
Oxford 3-piece Unbelievable Truth release their debut
album Almost Here on Monday. A fragile collection of songs which singer
Andy Yorke says "require a certain amount of attention". Despite a couple
of Top 40 hits to their name, the band are still best known for the fact
that Andy is the brother of Radiohead mainman Thom Yorke. But hey, Andy
doesn't only want to talk about THAT, as Planet Sound found upon meeting
Andy and bassist Nigel. (GOT THAT BIT WRONG DIDN'T THEY!) Andy, are you
sick of being asked about your brother Thom and Radiohead yet? "I dunno.
It depends how the questions are phrased. It's OK if it's not at the expense
of us talking about our music. Often I get the impression that I'm being
probed for information on Thom's private life and that's totally out of
order. Some interviewers assume our lyrics must point to some psychological
trauma in our childhoods. I just tell them the truth - there wasn't any."
You seem unhappy with the whole idea of hype around the band, Andy. Is
that so? "I don't dislike it - that's too strong a word but I'm uncomfortable
with it. Hype is more than just having to do interviews. That's part of
our job description really. If you want to sell records you have to do
these things. One thing we did early on was make a rule not to mime on
TV. That's filtered out a few shows, but we did Jools Holland and that
was excellent." Andy, is it true that The Sun wanted to use Higher Than
Reason for a TV advertisement? "Yes they approached a lot of bands that
were deemed to be hot at the time. We knew right away that we didn't want
to get involved with that sort of publication. You're on very dangerous
ground in terms of career longevity if you lend your songs to ads. You
look a bit of an arse. Hurricane#1 did it and they got a lot of flak."
How personal are your lyrics, Andy? "Not as personal as they appear. It's
not direct autobiography or confession. People read stuff into a song,
but it's not the best way to pin it down. The music is written before the
words." What would be the best scenario to hear your music, Andy? "Probably
the 3 o'clock in the morning in your bedroom scenario. Someone told us
they were driving along listening to our album and they got lost, so that
could be dangerous." Can you see the band as MTV stalwarts, Nigel? "I'm
tired of MTV's approach. Every shot on screen is under half a second. Our
videos are relatively slow. I find it insulting that they assume people
will become bored if the image doesn't constantly change. It can only be
a good thing to return to a longer attention span. I feel our music falls
into that camp - it needs some concentration. We're all so used to quick-fix
MTV, CNN-type culture now." Who are the couple kissing on the cover of
your album, Nigel? "We don't know! The picture was taken by a friend of
ours who's a photographer. It was taken randomly on the underground system
in Berlin. It's quite gutsy to see a couple of people cuddling and take
a picture without asking permission. The image is ambiguous in the same
way as our music. You know what it means but it's not precise. When we
saw the picture we all agreed it was beautiful."
UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH
...
The band draw on an eclectic range of musical influences,
including ambient artist Hugo Largo, Talk Talk, and even Gorecki's third
symphony - 'It's not a million miles away from what we do,' says Powell.
Yorke's lyrics on their debut album Almost Here (Virgin) tell of life's
uncertainties, crumbling relationships and the constant search for contentment,
but he finds them too personal to analyse. 'If you authoritatively explain
a song, it limits the way your audience can interpret it.'
Despite the shadows cast throughout the album, Powell
denies it's pessimistic: 'The songs are like travelling through the darkness
to get to the light, rather than getting to the darkness and stopping.'
The incandescent title track best illustrates this, and when Yorke's chillingly
beautiful voice reaches the heights he sounds like his brother, but on
a straight rather than twisted path.
....
c. Telegraph Magazine
1998
...
From The Sunday Times,
3 de Mayo 98
A Russian-speaking graduate with a brother in the most critically acclaimed
rock band of the 1990s releases his own stunning debut album. ANDREW SMITH
on the unlikely story of Andy Yorke
It runs in the family
The Unbelievable Truth's monkish singer, Andy Yorke, is one of the most
polite, soft-spoken and reflective men you could hope to meet. But you
can watch him turn into a cross between the Rev Ian Paisley and Travis
Bickle from the film Taxi Driver if you know just two ludicrously simple
words. Try it yourself if you ever bump into him, just as a dozy French
record company employee did earlier in the day. "Hello, Thom." Bang. Fireworks.
Though the unfortunate fellow swiftly corrected himself, Yorke is still
fuming hours later.
Because "Thom" is Thom Yorke, Andy's elder brother and singer with one
of the most respected groups of the 1990s, Radiohead. There have been many
examples of siblings starting out in the same successful band, but few
have achieved fame separately, which is why, for the past six months, all
anyone has wanted to ask Yorke Jr about is the difficulty of trying to
follow in his brother's imposing footsteps. The good news is that, as of
a week tomorrow and the release of Unbelievable Truth's remarkably composed
debut album, Almost Here, this will change. The sanity of Andy Yorke's
decision to follow his brother into the music business is no longer at
issue. Now, we want to know how one family could have produced two such
distinctive voices.
Had the brothers Yorke begun releasing albums a few years earlier than
they did, Oxford social services might well have been tempted to pay their
household a visit, expecting to find them confined to their bedrooms, sustained
only by a diet of gruel, Leonard Cohen records and girls who disappear
insultingly the moment you fall in love with them. Like the Hal Hartley
film after which Unbelievable Truth are named (they prefer Hartley's Trust,
but that was already taken), the dominant mood in both Yorkes' music is
melancholia, though Andy, with his rich, clear voice and uncluttered, emotional
lyrics, approaches his in a far more direct way. Only one of the 11 songs
on Almost There is much more than four minutes long, and they range in
texture from the concise, fluttering rock of the ill-chosen singles Solved
and Higher Than Reason, to the beautiful acoustic carnage of Stone, Same
Mistakes and Forget About Me. The atypically gregarious Settle Down, with
its transcendent vocal harmonies (a group speciality), brings to mind Neil
Young, or even the Eagles at their best: indeed, it would be possible to
read Almost There as a brand of urban British country music, though Yorke
denies any explicit country influence.
Unsurprisingly, they're already catching on in France, where angst is much
admired (see the enormous popularity of The Cure). Even here, Yorke is
not out of his brother's shadow, though he may have taken satisfaction
from the fact that, when the host of the television show on which he is
about to appear demands to know whether there are any Radiohead fans in
the audience, only two sheepish hands are raised. Backstage, at close quarters,
the pleasing eccentricity of the trio becomes evident. With his radical
haircut, drummer Nigel Powell looks like a refugee from Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
He talks a lot, too, whereas the bassist, Jason Moulster, sits motionless,
facing the door of the small room, blinking occasionally, but saying absolutely
nothing. After a while, you begin to wonder whether he's mute, or is making
some strange situationist statement. In performance, though, he is riveting,
every note seeming to pass like an electric current through him.
Then there's Andy Yorke. On stage, without his specs, he looks nothing
like his brother, though up close the resemblance is plain. His round,
fresh features make him look younger than his 25 years. He is probably
set to become the first British pop star with a degree in Russian from
Oxford University. After the show, he talks animatedly about the time he's
spent in Russia and his passion for its culture. In 1996, on the day before
he and his partners were to sign a dream first publishing deal, it was
to Russia that he slipped away for six months, with nary a word to anyone.
"I basically left the band," he says, shifting slightly in his seat. "I
didn't tell the rest of the band that. I left because I started writing
songs quite late, when I was 20. Three years later, we were being offered
a publishing deal and I think it was too fast for my little brain to cope
with. Even three years on, I didn't really think of myself as being a musician,
and I wasn't sure I wanted to be, I guess. I wasn't very comfortable, I
felt that I hadn't done enough other things yet. So I left. The day before
we were to sign the deal, actually. Which was . . ." He looks at the others
and shrugs. "Sorry." They laugh.
"At the time, I don't think I thought I was going to come back. Everybody
was ringing me up and saying, 'It's really brave, what you're doing.' But
it wasn't that. It just felt like the only thing I could do to stay sane."
Anyone having trouble understanding this should bear in mind that Thom
Yorke once described standing on a deserted Asian beach, the most beautiful
stretch of coastline he'd ever seen, and having the whole spectacle ruined
for him by the knowledge that he owed it all to MTV. Andy Yorke, too, will
agonise over being signed to a multinational record company in a way that
I thought people had given up. As far as both Radiohead and Unbelievable
Truth are concerned, postmodernism might never have happened - this being
one of their very greatest attractions. Where does their intensity come
from?
"Uhm. I don't know. It's not like we were abused as children or anything."
They had a "pretty normal" upbringing in the small market town of Abingdon,
near Oxford. He and Powell went to school togeth-er, playing in, of all
things, a glam-metal band that they refuse to name ("And me in this horrible
Morrissey cardigan and glasses - oh God"). At a loss, Yorke asks Powell
if he has any thoughts on the Yorke despond.
"Well, to me, it seems like an almost random genetic thing. There are certainly
traits that I've noticed that each of you seems to have inherited from
your parents. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason for it in terms
of your life experience."
The issue is this: is living in a permanent state of existential crisis
merely a convenient way of ensuring a constant supply of fresh material?
Writers such as Adam Duritz of Counting Crows and Mark Eitzel have long
had to fend off such allegations. After all, both Yorkes appear to be effective
individuals with a lot of advantages in life.
"I don't know. Three years ago, when I started writing these songs, I didn't
feel like a very effective person at all. A lot of the songs come from
that time when you've left education and are thinking, 'S***, what can
I do?' If there's a sense of confusion and feeling slightly lost in the
songs, that's probably where it comes from. Someone like Nigel is lucky,
because he only has one thing in life that he wants to do - music. That's
a real blessing. Whereas with me, there are two things in my life that
I feel passionate about. There's music, but also a desire to go work in
eastern Europe and get really immersed in that. So when things get really
weird - and I think this is scary for the rest of the band - in the back
of my mind, I'm thinking, 'Well, I don't actually need this. If I left,
I could do the other thing that I want to do.' "
Yorke admits to having feared that this ambivalence would hold him back,
stop him from "engaging in music properly". In the event, it gives this
odd misfit group an extra dimension that few others have. Good advice to
both Yorke and his expanding audience would be to enjoy it while we can.
THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH "HIGHER THAN REASON"
Higher than reason numero 38 en UK
UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH numero 1 in Anti-Hit List JAM
MUSIC
(Virgin CD singled Released 26th January.)
NIGHTSHIFT)
...
NME (Oxford Zodiac)
...And yet,when he sings, he could move mountains.
To tears.
...The songs themselves are precious and delicate,
like pearls strung together by gossamer spider's thread, filled with an
eerie, dream -like bleakness. The gentle swell of "Finest Little Place"(
tossed away as a B-side on the current single) is one last surf on a dying
ocean, ghostly and completely alone. Debut single "Building" is majestic
and desolate, rising like a snowstorm, creating a stark, a sinister landscape....
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