Aereogramme should’ve been much bigger. Why didn’t more people get it?

It was an interesting and varied list. There were bands from New York, Seattle, Sweden, Manchester, Wales and London. There was one from Ayrshire, name of Sucioperro. And, from Glasgow, there was Aereogramme.

The magazine recalled that the quartet had released a debut album, A Story in White, in 2001; and “with an expansive, ambitious sound veering from delicate to caustic, they released three further albums: Sleep & Release, Seclusion, and the epic My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go. The band called it a day in 2007, citing that financial struggles and ‘an almost superhuman ability to dodge the zeitgeist’ had taken their toll”.

Certainly, Aereogramme deserved more respect, not to say album sales, than they actually achieved. There was little shortage of critical praise or the approval of fellow musicians. This newspaper was not alone in being impressed by what it described as the band’s “unique and rather wonderful fusion of heartbreakingly delicate indie and captivatingly coruscating metal”.

Charlie Simpson, of Busted and Fightstar, loved the debut album; Ben Gautrey, of The Cooper Temple Clause, thought it a masterpiece that was actually bettered by Sleep & Release; and Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil adored the glorious farewell record – “amazing. Like the soundtrack to a film that hasn’t been made yet”, as he said at the time.

Back in March 2000 Aereogramme – Craig B., Iain Cook, Campbell McNeil and Martin Scott – had been one of the acts who guested at a special gig staged at the Garage, in Glasgow. The event marked the fifth anniversary of Chemical Underground, the label that had been established by the Delgados.

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Aereogramme hadn’t, at that point, actually signed to the label. Sign they did, and a four-track EP, White Paw, followed. One of its songs, ‘Zionist Timing’, aroused the interest of the Jewish Chronicle. It turned out that Craig had got the title from the 1999 Darwin Awards.

Israel had, one year, switched from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time earlier than usual – a move rejected by the Palestinians as “Zionist Time”. Three terrorists, however, were killed when their car bombs exploded: the bombs had been set to detonate on Daylight Saving Time but the drivers had already switched to Standard Time.

The song was one of the stand-out moments on the subsequent debut album, A Story in White, an ambitious, wide-ranging collection of songs. Bracingly loud guitars and full-throated vocals by Craig alternated with reflective offerings such as ‘Descending’ and the string-driven ‘Sunday 3.52’.

Paul Savage, the producer, has an interesting take on the album; in words quoted on the label’s website, he described it as fantastic, and praised the invention, the attention to detail, and Craig’s emotional vocals as he confronted such subjects as religion, intolerance and hatred.

To the Scotsman, the debut bore influences from the US underground scene, with Aereogramme walking a line between their label-mates Mogwai and Craig B’s former Krautrock-inspired band, Ganger, and his love of heavy metal.

A second studio album, Sleep & Release, followed in 2003, rife with compelling melodies and surging levels of noise. Their music, Ben Gautrey observed, “has so much imagination, blending absolute manic chaos with moments of innocent beauty, and yet at no time does it sound strained or formulaic. This album has managed to stay fresh and alive for me, despite my having played it constantly over the last year”. To the Sunday Herald’s Graeme Virtue, “marrying head-wrecking guitar volume with quavery emotion is a neat trick, and one that took the band their entire first album to actually master. But now they’ve really hit their stride; in terms of intensity alone, Sleep & Release will take a hell of a beating this year”.

My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go, by Aereogramme (Image: Aereogramme)

Aereogramme left Chemikal Underground after the release of the album, and a generally well-received third, Seclusion, came out on the Underground Recordings label in 2004 (Drowned in Sound’s review concluded: “You’d be hard pushed to find another record that encompasses such impossible beauty, soul-destroying metal, and ethereal grandiosity in just over 30 minutes).

The band returned to Chemikal for its fourth and final album, My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go, released on January 2007. “The album’s based around themes to do with different films and different cinematic moments”, Craig told the Sunday Mail. The title was a line from William Peter Blatty’s novel, The Exorcist, even though it wasn’t in the film version.

“All four of us are huge film fans”, Craig added. “Films have always been a reference point but on this album we made a specific point to make certain songs about certain films. There’s one song called ‘Trenches’ which has a World War II theme so we based it around a Band Of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan kind of feel”.

The National Post, in Ontario, noted that the band included a professional film composer in guitarist and programmer Iain Cook, whose creative arranging touch was prevalent on the new album. ‘Exits’, the Post’s writer said, suggested Cliff Martinez’s scores for Steven Soderbergh films such as Solaris; ‘The Running Man’, with its pounding synths, recalled the film of the same name, while the stirring ‘A Life Worth Living’ was the musical equivalent of a chase scene.

“We wanted to make things far more epic than just exploding like we’d done before,” Craig told the newspaper.

“Instead of just standing on distortion pedals and screaming, we wanted to create feelings of anger and tension and loss through string arrangements. We wanted [our music] to be powerful in a different way.” As indeed it was. Songs such as ‘Conscious Life for Coma Boy’, ‘Barriers’, ‘A Life Worth Living’ and ‘You’re Always Welcome’ were genuinely moving, the kind of songs that made Aereogramme your favourite new band.

The List magazine wasn’t far wrong when it decided that My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go was the year’s first great album.

“A remarkable collection of cinematic, touching and expansive songs”, it said, “with a melancholic dignity and elegance about them which is at times nothing short of jaw-dropping”. It singled out Craig B’s “heart breaking voice and beautifully sad lyrics”.

In May 2007, sadly, the band broke up, saying in a statement on MySpace that the reasons were “multiple and complex. It is however fair to say that the never-ending financial struggle coupled with an almost superhuman ability to dodge the zeitgeist have taken their toll, ensuring that we just don’t have any fight left in us. We are immensely proud of the four albums that we made over the past seven years”, they added. “We hope that they continue to grow in your hearts”.

Cook and Craig B formed a new band, The Unwinding Hours, and Cook went on to form Chvrches with Martin Doherty, who had played on Aereogramme’s last album, and Lauren Mayberry.

Russell Leadbetter examines classic, cult or under-appreciated albums in On the Record