Forget Cassettes - 'Salt' (Theory 8) Released 05/03/07

Forget Cassettes’ Beth Cameron is the thinking fan’s alt.rock icon in the making; the troubled, hypnotic and, if we’re to be honest, brutally seductive conduit through which her band channel their noisy, spiky guitars. For without her Forget Cassettes would be just another band blown to our shores by the dusty winds of American wastelands. Hailing from Nashville, Beth has been the only constant in a line-up that has proved to be as unsettled as the band’s approach to structure, the situation getting so bad recently that in the face of resignations she decided to soldier on regardless and tour Europe as a two-piece. How Gigwise wishes they were there.

Listening to ‘Salt’, Forget Cassettes’ second album, it’s hard to see how these songs, as busy and intent on shooting off at all manner of brilliant angles as they are, would work live when played with such a skeleton crew. Beginning with a rabid, amp-troubling clatter that would please fans of tour-mates Trail Of Dead…, ‘Salt’ is an album that sits brilliantly as a record to listen through from beginning to end. Over and over again. By the third time round influences and comparisons jump out, helping lend a clarity and form to the lurching, abrasive sound.

From the rawness of early-PJ Harvey to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ glittery downers, Forget Cassettes are impeccable in their touchstones. They even betray their years spent listening to the likes of Tool and Mars Volta, the sort of heavy rock bands it’s okay for fans of Tortoise to like. It’s in the way songs like ‘Vension’ appear to drop off the face of the earth in a nightmare of handclaps before suddenly clawing their way back, the way ‘My Maraschino’ sounds like it’s being played both forward and backwards simultaneously. By the time brass-filled climax ‘Tabula Rasa’ comes around the relief is both palpable that not only is there here the metaphorical light at the end of a fucked-up relationship, but that Forget Cassettes have realised that all great albums need that moment of release and revelation, the last lyric “You’d prefer to risk it” ringing out like a declaration of the band’s intent.

To paraphrase Cameron herself: it’s often beautiful to sound so sad and haunted.