There hasn’t been a debut this ominous and arresting from sleepy Lincolnshire since a radiant young Margaret Thatcher first addressed the Tory conference, and we all know how that one ended up. But if the 22-20s jack it all in tomorrow morning to become postmen, dustmen and vermin exterminators, they’ve already bequeathed us one of the truly great British rock debut albums.
With a frontman (Martin Trimble) who professes to love the Primals and Stereophonics as avidly as he does Hank Williams and Leadbelly, their influences are impeccable, but there’s way more going on here than the sum of their record collections: within seconds of the first blast of 22-20s, there’s no escaping a sense of something unnaturally special.
If the opening ‘Devil In Me’ is derivative (specifically, of the Gun Club classic ‘Devil In The Woods’), it’s magnificently so, an unrestrained all-out aural assault of sharp-fanged surf/slash guitar riffs with pounding psychedelic keyboard-abuse interludes that comes across like the four minutes of Jon Spencer’s wettest dreams. By inclination, the 20s keep things sharp, snappy and instinctively bluesy, with a Kinks/Stooges-like appreciation of brevity – but where most self-styled fast-loose-and-tough entities (Jet, for instance) hide behind their limitations and end up sounding half an evolutionary step up the ladder from Bo Diddley, this gang have a vast variety of weapons in the sonic arsenal and a ferociously impressive command of swamp-noise dynamics, each majestic wall-of-noise din implying the lurking threat within of an imminent cacophony still more terrible and vengeful. Lead guitarist Jason Irving favours trainee-Hendrix flights of soul-searching exploration over mindless chugalong rifferama, an imperative of absolute instrumental freedom the only apparent rule they’re beholden to, casting all tired genre conventions aside.
Lest anyone suspect the usual case of sound and fury signifying nothing, the record’s best moments are its quietest. When the din subsides on the stripped-down ‘Friends’, the results are unfeasibly beautiful. An echoing slide-guitar, each fragile ache worth a thousand elusive images from the more vivid passages of your past, evokes fading sunlight on some filthy dirty highway where Arizona and New Mexico blur into one, while Martin Trimble’s mild but hard-bitten voice is fit to keep the most exalted company imaginable: Nashville Skyline-era Dylan (with better vocals), the haunted serenity of Will Oldham, or the heartbreaking yearning of Simon Bonney’s similarly slide-drenched Everyman. In a not too distant vein (artery?), ‘The Things That Lovers Do’ recalls the more blissed-out, overtly narcoticised passages of Screamadelica.
22-20s is a stunning, haunting early warning from a supremely well-integrated band. Whatever their future holds – and the strong suspicion must be that there’s more up their sleeves – this moment will last and last.