Hey Negrita - Rope

  by John Clarkson

published: 25 / 5 / 2008

Label: Fat Fox
Format: CDS

intro

Stunning new single from Americana group Hey Negrita, who having survived significant line-up changes have their third album out later this year

When Hugo Heimann announced in late 2006 that he was leaving Hey Negrita, some might have predicted the end of the London-based Americana act. While his co-founder, singer and acoustic guitarist Felix Bechtolseimer had come up with the basic tunes and the lyrics, keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist Heimann was in many ways the backbone of the band. He had co-composed with Bechtolsheimer all of the group’s arrangements and played most of the instruments on their two albums to date, ‘We are Catfish’ (2005) and ‘The Buzz Above’ (2006). With guitarist Gus Glen, who had been a member of the band for about a year also choosing to leave Hey Negrita at the same time, Bechtolsheimer and drummer Neil Findlay, however, decided to instead regroup and to build a new band out of the old band. After recruiting into the line-up, Matthew Ord (guitars), Paul Sandy (double bass) and Will “Captain Bliss” Greener (vocals, harmonica), they spent most of 2007 working on their third album, ‘You Can Kick’, which is due out in September. Rope’ is both the first single from it, and the debut release of the new and revitalised group. The keyboards, a focal point of Hey Negrita’s past recordings, have been removed. ‘Rope’, however, is still nevertheless nothing short of stunning. A record that pulls off the double trick of being both elastic and tense in sound, it merges meandering, hazy-in-tone verses with taut, thundering choruses. Ord and Bechtolsheimer’s twin electric and acoustic guitars and Sandy’s clicking double bass wind around and play off each other, while Greener’s guttural blasts of harmonica zigzag in and out. This is matched by a typically hangman-style lyric from the smoke-voiced Bechtolsheimer about the collapse of a love affair. Far from just being just a song about break-up and loss, ‘Rope’ is, however, for all its blackness and dark humour also about against-the-odds hope. “Love boils the wires round my neck/but I swear I am not done yet”, Bechtolsheimer sings as an opening line. Later on he adds with similar defiance, “And the rain that is coming down/Yeah, it has only just begun/But the love that you left behind /Don’t mean much now that you’re gone.” ‘For a group such as Hey Negrita that has just gone through a rebirth, ‘Rope’, which is ultimately about carrying on, could not be any more of an appropriate choice for a first single and promises much for the forthcoming album.

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