With hindsight it's difficult to miss that the Very Things really were the absolute pinnacle of something or other and surely deserved a more strident crack of the whip, having very clearly defined themselves as distinct from the Cravats despite being more or less the same band. We had some great singles, two cracking albums - or one and a half depending on your mileage - then a sudden frosty silence broken only by the sound of One Little Indian shovelling every last penny into the chuffing Sugarcubes - regarding which I'm still feeling short-changed to this day. The posthumous missing album was interesting but didn't really feel like a missing album so much as some stuff that happened to be laying around. I was long resigned to that being our lot, and then this monster appears.
I'm not sure quite where Mr. Arc-Eye sits in the canon, or would have sat, and my first guess was that it followed fairly closely on the heels of Motortown in terms of recording. Recent smoke signals seem to suggest it's actually an entirely new album, which seems just as likely for, while consistent as what they did next, it also has a distinctly timeless sound. It's as sharply dressed as Let's Go Out with one meticulously glossy shoe still in the jazz dive - two in the morning by the sound of it - smoke everywhere. The horn section and driving bass invoke Motown without sounding like nostalgia, specifically the dark, dirty, raw Motown of the sixties when the label set vocal groups to the sort of instrumentation that gave the Stooges a run for their money. This may even be what Clock DVA were aiming for on Advantage, so maybe imagine a more muscular, more effortless Clock DVA if they all had jobs - down a coalmine, most likely. The most unexpected aspect of this record is how it blends the two very different strands revealed when Rob and the Shend went their separate ways - the driving soul of Hit the Roof or Vivarama with the growling motorbike beat of GrimeTime. It probably shouldn't have come together with quite such grace, but these men knew what they were doing.
I'm possibly lost in the moment here, but this may even be the greatest work by any of those involved, which is quite a boast considering the back catalogue in its entirety; and certainly Mr. Arc-Eye contains some of the Shend's most powerful vocal performances. I realise there's not much point harbouring a grudge thirty years after the fact, but I really would have appreciated something like this more than the oh so fucking quiet song.
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