Young Marble Giant "Colossal Youth" [re-issue]

In an era of global reunion tours and loudly-trumpeted comeback albums, there was something reassuringly unassuming about the Young Marble Giants' recent reformation. Last month, they quietly played the Hay-On-Wye literary festival, their first set since splitting in 1981. In photographs, the reunited trio look defiantly unlike a band: they have the air of PTA members to whom someone has handed instruments by mistake. At youngmarblegiants.com you can read guitarist Stuart Moxham's account of events, a charming panoply of Pooter-ish concerns that succeeds in making the show seem more unassuming still. His delight at discovering that his elderly mother's disabled badge entitles them to "pole position in the best car park" is tempered by his stepping in a "shockingly cold" puddle and banging his head on a low beam in the youth hostel in which he has elected to stay. He is even forced to cut his post-gig celebrations short, although not, alas, as a result of rock and roll excess: "I'd neglected to get keys to the youth hostel for that night and didn't know how difficult it might be to find in the dark".

Then again, even at the height of their success, when their one and only album Colossal Youth briefly became the second-biggest seller for their label Rough Trade, unassuming was rather the Young Marble Giants' thing. They never looked like a rock band: singer Alison Statton's plimsolls, print dresses and ponytail give her the look of a wholesome village schoolteacher. Their rhythms came from a drum machine that they made themselves by following diagrams in Practical Wireless magazine; onstage, even this proved too flashily high-tech, and was replaced by a portable cassette recorder. While their peers earnestly debated cultural hegemony or furthered the cause of radical feminism by being as tuneless as possible, Young Marble Giants released the Testcard EP, "six instrumentals in praise and celebration of mid-morning television" (included here on the appended CD of single tracks and muffled demos).

Indeed, the one thing Young Marble Giants had in common with their early-80s contemporaries was that they were haunted by the spectre of the nuclear bomb. Yet they somehow even managed to refer to imminent apocalypse in an inconspicuous way. Final Day lasted barely 90 seconds, a tiny, perfect knot of muted guitar and burbling organ undercut by a barely audible but still unsettling one-note whine. "When the light goes out on the final day, we will all be gone, having had our say," sang Statton, sounding, in Moxham's immortal phrase, "as if she was at the bus stop or something". Apocalyptic dread may be back in musical vogue at the moment; compare Final Day to Arcade Fire's anguished end-of-days schtick, with its choral vocals and strings and thundering timpani, and there's no doubt which would sound more stirring while booming from a Glastonbury stage. But there's equally little doubt which burrows deeper under your skin.

Rock music has gorged itself at the post-punk buffet to the point of dyspepsia in recent years. Colossal Youth, however, sounds no more of-the-moment than when it was first reissued in 1990, at the height of Madchester and the birth of grunge. Nor does it sound more dated. It exists in a world of its own. Amid the tick-tocking of the drum machine and Statton's oblique lyrics about robots, failed romance and train crashes, there is a sound that manages to be both stark and serpentine: a lone twanging guitar or organ and bass, the parts wrapping around each other "like knitting", as Moxham put it. It's a suitably un-rock'n'roll simile for music that sounds like nothing else in rock'n'roll.

Even more striking is how the songs pull so much variety out of such basic ingredients. Salad Days is wistful and pastoral; instrumental The Taxi conjures up nameless urban crepuscular fear; Wurlitzer Jukebox's dazzling bass slips between limber funk and mechanical precision. It's spellbinding, as is the rest of the Young Marble Giants' oeuvre collected here: an unassuming triumph, but a triumph nonetheless.

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