As many of us know, sometimes life has a strange way of falling into place around our most casual endeavors, even when we’re busy putting concentrated effort into other, more sharply-defined goals. For guitarist-songwriters Jack Cooper and James Hoare, that’s exactly what’s happened with their new collaboration Ultimate Painting. Cooper and Hoare were barely acquainted when their two longtime bands—Mazes and Veronica Falls, respectively—toured together in 2013. On that outing, they found themselves chatting about music and enjoying each other’s company, which led to an informal recording session.
Recorded quickly and casually on all-analog gear at Hoare’s London apartment, the pair’s new self-titled debut album (out now on Chicago-based imprint TroubleInMind) flows with an ease that immediately lets you know the music wasn’t fussed-over. Although Cooper and Hoare had shared rough sketches with one another prior, they did most of the writing together on the spot, working out guitar and vocal arrangements on the fly and building the songs up from there. On the other hand, considering the loose atmosphere, the songs cohere remarkably well. This is especially surprising considering that some songs weren’t even arranged into traditional verse-chorus structures and, thus, required fade-outs for lack of a more decisive way to conclude them.
Clearly, Cooper and Hoare gelled creatively, but they also emphasize the importance of their newfound personal rapport.
“It was the hanging out, the social aspect, and especially talking about music that sparked us just as much as each other’s playing,” Hoare explains over a Skype call with Cooper at his side.
Cooper chimes-in: “We spent a lot of time talking about the most obvious bands like the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Velvet Underground. There’s a thing with people in other bands—and I guess record collectors and listeners too—where they’re always trying to turn someone on to something they’ve never heard or talk about obscure records. There’s lots of things we like that are obscure, but it was refreshing to just be able to talk to someone about the Beatles.”
Given that both Cooper and Hoare play in British indie-pop bands with heavy psychedelic leanings, it’s no surprise that a psychedelic undercurrent runs through their debut. But in this setting, they forego the shoegaze of Veronica Falls and the punkish uptempo rock of Mazes (not to be confused with the psychadelic Chicago band of the same name) for a considerably mellower mood music that one imagines they might want to listen to after playing a gig in either of those other bands. The pair’s clean guitars gently jangle and sway like two boats docked side by side in calm waters. Meanwhile, Cooper and Hoare make little effort to hold themselves back from sounding like the iconic bands they discussed back when they were first breaking the ice. By the start of track three, in fact, Ultimate Painting blatantly references the Velvet Underground twice. The second time, on a Cooper-penned number titled “Talking Central Park Blues,” the pair arguably crosses the line between inspiration and mimicry as it hits uncomfortably close to the Velvets classic “What Goes On.” That aside, the album puts across a warm, nostalgic glow without ever tipping over into overt retro-philia.