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"This is the Big Music"
Sometimes even the inkling of a first impression is enough to tell you that a band is destined to shape the pop landscape for years to come. A band with a twinkle in their collective eye and their hearts on their sleeves, a band who look and feel and sound completely right. A band who seem to have been around forever; who appear to belong to a different time altogether, who express so perfectly all that makes pop music wonderful that it seems only just and proper that they should exist.
New Adventures are one of those bands.
For it's not just their attire but their ambition of song that conveys a kind of stateliness only usually acquired through time immemorial. This is music heavy with decayed grandeur; beautiful yet sinister, with a significance oft missing from today's trend for fast-buck, instant-fame, mass-produced miscellany. Music to fill cathedrals to the rafters and every chamber of your heart. Music that matters.
Friends since university, the four boys had been playing music for as long as they care to remember; as Nick puts it, "It was always the plan". Jez discovered he could handle the responsibility of the microphone when he invaded someone else's performance "and for some reason wasn't kicked off stage" and the need for a singer helped him grow into the responsibility. Raph - he of the bass - was more or less a founder member. Steve had been "playing coat hangers" since he was a kid and eventually found his muse in the form of lead guitar. Nick's addition to the band preceded a 4-date tour in which they had their van and all of their equipment stolen, but rather than being cast aside as some bad luck omen he was in fact given the responsibility of the beat on a full-time basis. "I think the collective suffering bonded us in a 'Stick it to the Man' kind of togetherness. I was in for the long haul!". And so the band existed for some time.
The quartet finished higher education and decamped to London, with Steve and Jez indulging their love of vintage gear by flogging from a shop in Covent Garden. It was here that, one day, Helen popped in for some jeans and left with grander ideas. "Maybe it was fate or good luck, but they were the best pair of jeans I ever bought". She took up the keys, provided some lush backing vocals, and revealed to the rest of the band what they'd been missing all along. "She was the final piece," says Jez, and for Steve "our best musician". The vintage vibe swept through the rest of the band and brought look and sound into close quarter.
The resulting democracy set to work spinning their threads of influence together, slowly awakening their own sound, checking and re-checking their individual touchpoints for a source of inspiration. "The classical music I resented as a rebellious teen ended up having a great impact on me", says Jez; a sentiment with which the rest of the band would concur. Of his soaring, heartbreaking vocal he's far more humble. "It just comes out when I sing my own words. I rarely enjoy listening to my own voice but I love singing, which is a strange contradiction". Strange indeed when you hear what happens when Jez puts that voice into action. Timeless yet vulnerable, it perfectly pilots New Adventures' vessel of planet-sized pop.
Like Arcade Fire without the aloofness; Radiohead minus the melodrama, New Adventures invoke Wayne Coyne's spirit of music as emotional call-and-response and cast it across Wilco's sepia-washed sunsets, all deftly conjured with their own seventh sense for a pop melody. It's all there, in the way "A Million To One" takes off into the galaxy on its coda and the expansive, pleading chorus of "It's In Our Hands". That's not even mentioning the symphonic "How I Got My Devil Back" and how it faces down all your and its own fears against the backdrop of the Northern Lights. And that's just for starters. The band will tell you that the scope and stature of their output just redoubles with every song Jez presents for them to breathe life into. "He just keeps getting better and better" says Helen. Indeed Jez's sense of perfectionism leads him to thinks that he'll spend the rest of his life "trying to write the perfect love song". Call it a hunch, but we don't think it'll take him that long.
Their breadth and wonder astonishing; their honesty, charm and levity disarming, New Adventures are going to be one of those bands you can't help but fall in love with. Their ambitions are rooted in modesty but arc inevitably toward the stars. New Adventures stand at the dawn of their own revolution, hands outstretched for you to join them.
Hometown
London
Country
United Kingdom
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