Our Wild Mercury Years

Restock. New low price on all Track And Field label titles! Kicker's long awaited debut, "Our Wild Mercury Years" takes it's name from a Robert Forster quote and is made from 'wood, metal and electricity'. It is a record of loves lost and found, of hearts broken and mended. It rails against cynicism in cynical times and asks that maybe we should stop pretending we're too cool to care and maybe, just for once, wear our hearts on our sleeves. Honesty is always the best policy. Sincerity is better than fashion. "Our Wild Mercury Years" was recorded in north London between 2002 and 2004. Featuring ex-members of Velocette, Hood and Comet Gain, and with the players also lending their skills to the Projects and the Eighteenth Day of May, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Kicker is an indie supergroup of sorts. But this is a band worth far more than the sum of it's equal parts. Each song played by Kicker is a micro-score to some three minute Up the Junction-like reflection upon a council block façade. A black and white pan across an autumnal city horizon, to a single mother pushing her pram through the park, chased by the leaves. To bored kids throwing stones into the windows of abandoned sheds. To the drunks who sit in the same place every single day and drink their lives away 'cos it's less painful that way. Each Kicker song contains the mad drive of the city yet is coated in the melancholy of the sorrow of the unwanted. In a world dominated by bland and grey wallpaper groups like Athlete and Snow Patrol, Kicker's take on the Northern Soul classic, "Since You Left" could well be a contender for pop moment of 2005, with it's mournful, anguished vocal mixed with a bouncing Motown-like rhythm. Track & Fl. 2006.