Single Review: Northern Exposure

An interesting song, Jiahu Symbols’ Northern Exposure opens with a guitar swathed in chorus, maybe a little tremolo, with a couple of bars before the song crashes into life.

The verse structure is played a couple of times, before Andrew Murray-Brown begins singing. He has a shoegaze, slightly lackluster vocal style, which raises in the chorus.

At 2:57 long it is just under the ‘perfect pop’ length of three minutes, and it fits in with all the typical features of a pop song.

Listening to the bridge, I can’t help but think they’d have trouble pulling the timing off live; Murray-Brown’s vocal line is seemingly off-beat within the snare drum roll driven structure. To be honest I found it jarring and a bit clumsy, seriously brave and interesting, but mathematically odd.

Lyrically it tells a relationship or friendship story. In their press notes the band compares it thematically with The Front Lawn’s song Andy, which as a card-carrying Don McGlashan fan is always going to seem like a huge call.

Musically the band is pretty tight, I look forward to hearing them develop.