The Cinematics

The Cinematics spent the latter part of last year holed-up in a disused army barrack in the west end of Glasgow, hiding from the world outside as it danced provocatively with disaster and ruin, and writing the songs which would ultimately become their new album, Love and Terror.

The band spent late-afternoons reading Rimbaud, Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe, imbibing weapons-grade coffee or cheap red wine, eating bizarre combinations of Chinese food and fighting over the records that they would listen to. The rhythm-section of Adam Goemans and Ross Bonney would play Sly and the Family Stone or Motown records, while guitarist, Larry Reid, would insist on the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. All the while singer, Scott Rinning, would gaze in horror at day-old newspaper stories detailing the sad plight of bumblebee populations and the ever-receding polar ice-shelf.

By night the four would conduct absinthe-fuelled recording-sessions, writing new songs with an old eight-track tape-recorder that they brought from America the previous summer. Working to the principles that guitar riffs should contain four notes or less and that very few songs should last any longer than three-and-a-half minutes, the band managed to write and record a new song almost every day of their stay in the barrack.

This routine was punctuated only by covert shoplifting missions to plunder local supermarkets of biscuits and fresh underwear.

After three months of writing and recording they were forced to dismantle their studio and vacate the building when police eventually investigated the unearthly noises heard at ungodly hours in the area. By this time, however, the band had already garnered a mass of songs and many of the actual recordings made during those months would eventually form the sonic nucleus of the new Cinematics album. In any case, the owners of the Chinese takeaway had become reluctant to offer any more food on credit and the supermarkets grew suspicious of the strange young men with unseasonably long coats.

In order to capture the raw energy of the songs, it was quickly decided that they would record this new album themselves, disregarding modern studio trickery to produce a more honest and transparent sound than that found on the band’s first album, Strange Education (2007). Disco-funk rhythms meld explosive vocals, buzz-saw guitars, weeping feedback and dark, analogue synth-lines.

On the eve of delivering the album recordings, Ross and Adam’s home was fire-bombed in the early hours of the morning, in a failed insurance swindle involving the bar downstairs. Both band-members remained relatively unscathed, although drummer Ross was forced to brave the inferno to rescue the album masters.

Written during a difficult and uncertain time for the band, the songs on Love and Terror reflect the dark conditions from which they were born. Over the course of the record relationships break down under the burden of hardship and resentment, society dissolves into self-preservation, capitalist strongholds collapse and sacred cows are slaughtered for sustenance.

With Love and Terror, The Cinematics have produced an honest and moving record of our times and have distinguished themselves as an ambitious band with something to say.