These New Puritans - Hidden

When facing a new decade, it’s not unusual to cast an eye over your shoulder and reflect on the past. Isn’t that what New Year’s resolutions are all about – Proving a point to yourself? So as if to prove their weight in vision, These New Puritans chose 2010 to be the year in which they release their musical point-proving reckoning.

Hidden retains the dark undercurrents of murderous intent that were both disquieting and thrilling in Beat Pyramid, this time cloaking them in a poco a poco crescendo of quiet apocalypse. Take lead single ‘We Want War’: with some sagely tuned horns, intriguingly called Kangling (they’re Tibetan in origin and traditionally made of human thighbones…), the track acts as a 7-minute opus to the deep-rooted history of war lying beneath our feet.

Many of the album’s noises comprise of Foley elements – chains, smashing glasses, sword noises – itself a technique of the cinematic world. But more unsettling still is the obscure beauty at the heart of the LP, ‘Drum Courts – Where Corals Lie’. Here, the fundamentals of what make TNP exciting are shown to the extreme, in abrasive drum rolls and whispered murmurs, which are suddenly and unfathomably tempered by woodwind into a re-imagining of Elgar’s ‘Where Corals Lie’.

Taking on one of the great English composer’s clarinet flutters and moulding it into your nightmares is bold. Repeating such tricks – thunderous tubas playing into triangular hypnotism on ‘Three-Thousand’ for example – is brazen.

Slapping your finances down and hiring in a full-size orchestra, then writing a score, demands a mound of belief; and one which, if we’re honest, Beat Pyramid didn’t warrant. Yet, flummoxing as it is, they have journalists scratching their heads over bassoon parts for good reason.

As the parps that end the album on ‘5’ play the last, These New Puritans have strode confidently out with what is undoubtedly an absurd masterpiece in our brave new world; one we will clamber over ourselves to experience live.