Reigns are one of the hidden gems of the UK underground. Secretive and eccentric, working studiously within their chosen parameters they produce curious and unsettling records that seem to emerge from another place. Or perhaps outline the familiar from another perspective. Sometimes they feel like ghosts, watching from beyond the veil with a resigned mix of amusement and horror. On their eighth full length The Antigeist they move in a little closer, facing the “daily drip of unfathomable stupidity and evil” with songs about the grind of poverty, the return of fascism, overweening ambition, cynical appeals to religious authority, the everyday visitation of grief, nonsensical ideas around immigration and ending the despair by walking into the sea.
Taking their usual mix of storytelling and spooky soundtrack sounds to a logical end point, their last release Dead Centre paired an extraordinary and hallucinatory novel with an album long instrumental piece. Here the pendulum swings backs hard to the most band and song shaped thing they’ve ever done. Abandoning their Reigns pseudonyms of Operatives A and B the Farthing brothers step out under their own names. It feels like there’s a lot more piano from Roo and a lot more softly melodic singing from Tim, rather than the stark narration of earlier material. They are are joined by Rob Ellis on drums and Joe Thompson on bass. Working as a live band the album was recorded in a single session before being reworked over a year of tweaking and refining. Arguably the music is prettier but it remains filled with disquiet.
These new songs may address the world more directly but not by casting off their literary bent. The album’s title, an uneasy mix of zeitgeist, poltergeist, and Antichrist, comes from the second track ‘Beast’ which opens with a biblical vision and works in twists on Dickens and British history as part of a reflection on the rising darkness of fascism. Prophetically the enervated synth-pop of ‘Population 206’ spins out immigration myths to a ridiculous end, a future for the isolationist absurdity recently manifest in the town of Piddington. Squirming with fear and guilt the bleeping pulse of ‘Cramming’ becomes more insistent as Reigns deploy the familiar move of sketching a scenario through unanswered questions, in this case about the religious conversions of powerful men in trouble.
If you’ve been taking in these tales of our every day horror you might reasonably expect the final tune ‘America’ to address the raging dumpster fire engulfing the United States but it does so in only the most tangential fashion. Faced with the ongoing misery of the world our defeated and apologetic narrator folds his clothes under the pier and walks into the sea, towards America. Poetically bleak the tune is suffused with an amniotic serenity as we stroll across the sea floor, weightless now with the peace of leaving it all behind. Personally I’m more of a walk into the woods and disappear forever kind of guy but the impulse is the same and, it now seems, near universal. This latest chapter is still unsettling, still marvellous, still Reigns.
