Description
Label Review.
2020 album also available on Vinyl.
Our Overview.
Glaswegian formed quintet Spinning Coin release their second album, ‘Hyacinth’, via Geographic. This is indie music from its bowl haircuts to its dirty Converses. The two songwriters in the band have their different strengths. Jack Mellin draws more from the spikier end of things, with Tin sounding like a slightly less ramshackle Josef K song, while Sean Armstrong tends towards the more straight forwardly melancholic end of indie.
Throughout Hyacinth, there is joy in spades, but also melancholy, and a checked fury, threading the group’s political vision through their reflections on the personal and the interpersonal. Jack explains that the new songs “are about the need for love in an often very unloving world. Trying to find a balance of some kind between feelings of apathy, negativity, detachment and action, positivity and oneness.” Whilst Mellin’s songs were more pointedly political on Permo, here he has built more complexity into his writing. Elsewhere, Rachel contributes her first song to a Spinning Coin release, in the form of the beautiful “Black Cat”.
Hyacinth was recorded during a few days, by Peter Deimel at Black Box Studios in France, while the group were on a summertime tour. It was an idyll, a restorative respite. That carries through to the album, there’s a sense of society and collectivism at the heart of these pop songs, and a commentary on the optimism of the will, no matter how bleak things can get. Ultimately, on Hyacinth, the Spinning Coin ethos stays true to itself, as Sean expands about the experiences and the motivations behind the new music: “It’s trying to connect with other people on a human level, doing something that we love, and trying to embrace the unknown.”
A brave step forward, ‘Hyacinth’ is an album full of poetry, light and warmth of heart and presents a band holding nothing back. ‘Hyacinth’ registers a number of changes for the group since their debut album ‘Permo’ in 2017: personnel changes, geographical changes, a new context, an ever-changing world outside.
Tracklisting: Avenues of Spring / Feel You More Than / World Right Now / Get High / The Long Heights / Despotic Sway / Ghosting / Laughing Ways / Black Cat / Soul / Trader / Never Enough / Slips Away / It’s Alright / Thing Of The Past