The first time I heard Club Valley was at the beginning of the year. I saw them play live at Cape Town’s Old Biscuit Mill alongside Alice Phoebe Lou for her independent concert series WE HERE. The two unassuming indie songwriters – Nigel and Jason – took to the stage with charming nonchalance, and from the first vibrations of their percussive melodies, I was enthralled.
Their sound is multi-faceted to say the least. Heady and heavy licks of garage rock, punk and lo-fi collide with subtle hip-hop undertones, their murky strings and bashing drums evoking some sense of a dizzying underworld. Their instrumental approach is surprisingly stripped back, with Nigel on guitar and vox and Jason on the drums, yet textured and richly melodic at the same time.
Their debut EP Life As You Know It: The Best of Luck And The Worst of Times came out a little over two months ago, at which point I found my way back to their daring and experimental sound, and I’m so glad I did.
I think “ILAH’S DREAM” is one of the best tracks I’ve heard all year. There’s a sadness that comes through the cascading minors, the volatile falsettos, which drown out everything else around them, leaving just enough emptiness for Nigel’s aching vocals to come through. It certainly doesn’t sound like a love song, but you can feel that it’s about nothing else but love.
“We were on the road literally playing to save our lives, and writing at the same time,” Nigel tells me over the phone, “and a lot of the songs from the EP came quite spontaneously from those moments. It’s life man – that’s what we try to capture with our music.”
Two months later and their second short-length project, A Grand Display of Chaos, followed with similar profundity. Opener “MIDDLE FOREVER” is so delicate but simultaneously gruelling. The guitars explode, descending into utter shoegaze chaos, the light of the melody slowly fading.
“Our songwriting process is a very intuitive one,” says Jason, continuing, “We record everything live, but more importantly we don’t allow ourselves to be boxed in. We just try to capture the present energy of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”
The duo’s inspiration ranges from the local talents of Yndian Mynah to BADBADNOTGOOD, Lauryn Hill and Kendrik Lamar, and this stylistic muddle shows in the music they make. And I don’t use the word muddle in a negative sense, not at all. I use it to convey that almost claustrophobic feeling of disarray in their sound, so dense it surrounds you, and keeps you there with total clarity.
“RIVERSIDE” and “RUDE PORT CITY RADIO” are similarly two-fold – loud yet soft, painfully melancholic yet deeply hopeful. Rapturous. Spiritual. Beautiful.
“People often ask about our image as a band and the answer is that we have no image,” says Nigel. “As soon as you start to stand behind things you lose sight of what you genuinely have. People will be surprised by how much they can achieve by just being themselves, and that’s what we’re finding out too.”
Guys, please, do yourselves a favour and listen to Club Valley. I’m not exaggerating when I say that they’re one of the most exciting South African bands around right now, and their future is bright. You’ll find yourself in these songs just as quickly as you’ll lose yourself to them.
