A debut album that has been four years in the making, you would hope that it was worth the wait. Happily, it is. From a tentative two-piece making hesitant melodies over backing tracks, they’ve grown into a band of larger stature - still just Andrew Eaton and Hamish Brown, but sounding like so much more. The whole 4 years are documented here since their debut single ‘We Just Make Music For Ourselves’ burst onto the nation’s airwaves (it did, really, a Mark Radcliffe Record of the Week). It seems that the band have been preoccupied since, but recently - apart from geting this magnum opus out - they achieved a perhaps more significant feat - supporting John Foxx in Glasgow. Foxx, for the uninitiated, was founder of Ultravox, in the days long before Midge Ure’s pointy sideburns took the New Romantic scene and MTV by storm. Basically, Foxx invented everyone from Gary Numan to Soft Cell to the Pet Shop Boys in his bending Kraftwerk’s synth blueprint into something chart-ready. His patronage - even if via by his agents rather than necessarily a personal decision - has great significance. Basically, Swimmer One have taken on the mantle of torch-bearers for electronic pop, and Variations is the legacy. From the metallic beats of opener ‘Drowning Nightmare 1’ to the mock gothic horror of ‘Don’t Go In The Basement’ it’s an album of stark beauty, Brown’s sparkling guitar lines standing out like jewels in a sea of gloomy synth lines.
While Swimmer One are taking a 30-year old musical style and polishing it up until it gleams, there have been other innovators along the way which the duo take under their wing - a touch of Closer-era Joy Division in the moodier passages, and conversely, it’s the Blue Nile with beats on the likes of ‘National Theatre’. Scotland wasn’t exactly a pioneer in the synth wars, but Eaton’s accent reminds us where they’re from, but not as much as the album’s crowning glory - the sinister Scottish coastal travelogue that is ‘Largs Hum’.
With all this praise for what is assuredly one of the best albums you’ll hear all year, if not millennium, there are fears that in this world of disposable pop they may be a band destied to vanish, rather like labelmates Luxury Car. Therefre, if you have any liking for - well, not just electronic music, but genuinely life-affirming pop, I urge you to listen to this album. You’ll not just be doing the band a favour, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.
