WE'LL SHIP WHEN IT'S BACK IN STOCK

Album Notes

Space is an exquisitely melodic labour of love by a band of absolute 60s nuts. Oxford jangle-poppers The Relationships have perfected a pastoral, very English and gently middle-class take on psychedelia. Fans of Robin Hitchcock and XTC will find much to enjoy here.

This rather hippified album evokes a gentle, dreamy and everlasting summer afternoon where the real world seems an impossibly long way away. The band’s self-styled ‘tweedy psychedelia” – chiming twelve-string guitar, harmonies and all - has echoes of the Byrds and Love (the spiritual godfathers of this sort of thing), as well as Fables of the Reconstruction–era REM and Shack.

Oxford’s leafy beauty, bookishness and sense of aesthetics have definitely rubbed off. Main man Richard Ramage (vocals, guitar, songwriting) seems to be the man with the vision. Nevertheless, Space is a real team effort, light and graceful – evoking tea and LSD with the vicar on a Sunday before gently freaking out on the village green watching the cricket.
Their Albion is a whole less grubby than Peter Doherty’s, where respect for an older generation (‘We got bombed in the war / we cried when Mr Churchill died’) exists alongside a love for every 60s freak’s favourite casualty alongside Syd Barrett (‘Living in a House with Brian Jones’).

Opener ‘Space Race’ introduces the album’s conceptual trimmings, as the HMS Britannia blasts off into space, while the charmingly fey ‘Soft Rock Canyon’ dreams of hanging out in Laurel Canyon “where the gentle people are / driving jeeps under the stars”.

‘Her Constituency’ is a hymn to the perfect girl; ‘Time in the World’ wonders if one particular charmed summer will go on forever; and closer ‘The Eternal Colonel’ bursts the bounds of time and space altogether.
Nostalgic, gently spaced out and rather posh, this is lovely stuff indeed.

Ben Wood
Bearded Magazine