The ‘Big Hat’ facebook page description (‘When Fleet Foxes had unprotected sex with Stornoway, Big Hat was born’) is (however ‘racy’) a slightly unfortunate one. It is unfortunate partly in being a little crass, but, more importantly, because it sells the quintet short. The sound and aesthetic are similar, if you squint a bit, but overall, Big Hat have so much more to offer than simply a rehashed blend of late noughties cry-cry-indie-boy bedroom fingerpicking.
These boys can play. I use the word boy with some deliberation. This is another fairly predictable trope: a gang of well-mannered ex-public schoolboys with guitars and prized sachets of Drum tobacco. In truth, I can’t really believe how young they are, a fact belied by the complexity and sophistication of their melodies.
Griping about the predictability of their set-up doesn’t really tell you much about the music, though, which is, at its best, absolutely sublime. The vocals are strong with this one, while judicious use of guitar (artfully provided by Jack Raeder of Jesus College, Oxford) adds structure to tunes that otherwise might risk being overly dreamy. For the record, I’m not the only one to think they’re great: ‘Land of Sky and Ocean’, taken from their first EP, provides the backing to the newest Canterbury Clothing advertisement.
So many sixth form all-male groups disband at the end of their first year of university, leaving a slimy trail of ‘garage soundz’ all over the Myspace wasteland. This is usually very amusing, because the vast majority of sixth form bands are usually very bad. Here, Big Hat do buck a trend: they are actually very good. Should they succeed in continuing over the next few years, I predict quite wonderful things for these boys.
(As a side note, Google informs me that there is another such band of schoolboys with guitars, billing themselves as The Big Hat Band. This is a very good example of such bands being usually very bad.)
The band have released a number of EPs, most of which can be listened to here, while the video for ‘Land of Sky and Ocean’ is here.
