Credit: Rachel Dickens

With a career-saving second wind, cult band The Keys are currently in a make shift studio, preparing for their first release in four years. Tracking down songwriter Matthew Evans, Beren Neale recalls why the music is worth the wait.

I remember when I first saw The Keys’ debut album. Stacking the racks of Bristol’s Imperial Music, the amateur family photo of a crying child looked like just another album to be eclipsed by the recent peripheral epiphanies of Ill Ease and Electrelane. It got a dutiful play, and then patiently beat my assumptions into submission.

In my defence, The Exorcist and The Power Out were audacious excursions in sordid style and virtuosity. The Keys, like the artwork, at first seemed too familiar. Distanced, you could hear a sedated Dream Syndicate - ebullient clean jangles, melodies moving under the skin-thin opaque production, mirroring the cover’s mid-sleep ingenuousness. Up close the songs became more erratic, running from the kids song-simple of Driving School to the boundless, lugubrious closer Animus. Held together by Matthew Evans’s placating voice, a thread of intimacy pierces the album. The inappropriate styles hang on it like the garments of a colour-blind eccentric: jumbled, confused, but with limitless interpretations. This was not what people were buying in 2004. Actually, no one bought it afterwards either. I took the only copy home and quietly obsessed about the three best albums of the year.
 
Then nothing. No gigs, no follow-up, no demand, no music. Four years on and the band, once the nucleus of Murray The Hump, are no closer to having that multi-album shop-stocking deal than when they started. I send the band a handful of questions and the answers come lethargically back, three months later – genuine, irregular, just like the music. The three year gap: “We were unhappy with Too Pure... Put simply, they didn’t love us;” their lo-fi textures: “Some of it was recorded in the toilet of my house;” and the business side: “We’re starting from scratch again in terms of promoting ourselves, which is kind of exciting, but any impetus we'd built up before, however small, has gone.”
 
The two architects of the first album, Matth Evans and guitarist Gwion Rowlands, are engrossed in the recording process, this time with a band behind them and a little extra studio room. “We’re recording in an old theatre in Resolven - the village where I was raised. It has amazing natural acoustics, so Elgoodo and us have set up a portable studio in one of the changing rooms there [and are] using an old 16-track analogue tape machine.”