Pitchfork

Success is creatively problematic. Any audience you build has expectations, and will abandon the artist that disappoints them. Successful records establish and cement a band's identity, limiting them conceptually-- just look at what happened to the Violent Femmes on Hallowed Ground. But obscurity is conversely problematic, as without an at least perceived audience to bounce back adoration for what it is you're supposed to be, bands tend to flail about on a whim. Without expectation, every record is your first, a clean slate. We often assume bands that change their sound do so cynically, trying to capitalize on the latest trends, but Hood arex92t such opportunists: this is a band almost childlike in their honest indulgences, playing with genres like toy blocks, changing their sound drastically whenever something new inspires them. Always selfish but never self-obsessed, Hood-- a Leeds quartet initially mired in lo-fi indie rock-- are definitively whimsical.

For just over a decade, they've worked the independent circuit, releasing a spate of 7\x94 inch singles recently compiled-- along with older, unreleased tracks recorded between 1994 and 1998-- as the 59-track, twin-disc Singles Compiled set. 40 of these songs fit on disc one, so simple math should clue you in: Hood didx92t start out playing 6-minute, glitch-infused post-rock dirges. In fact their nascent points of reference are lo-fi acts like This Kind Of Punishment, Sebadoh and New Radiant Storm King. Hood's first few singles are overloaded with droning one and two-minute acoustic guitar dirges, most indistinguishable compositionally, and/or sonically; the first single \x93A Harbor Of Thoughts\x94 (1995) contains most of the best of this material.

Presented in chronological order, the band flowers beautifully. From predictably distorted bedroom bleating, you can hear the band's increasing exposure to and obsession with ambient and jungle music, as landscape meditations build into accomplished combinations of drum x92 bass and indie rock. Their first major success in this field was 1998's \x93Weight\x94 single, which-- although it's dominated by more moping, inconsequential one-minute tracks-- marks the band's split with indie guitar and features a loving tribute to Warp Records, \x93Feel The Rush\x94.

In 1998, Hood changed everything, working with Matt Eliot of Third Eye Foundation and taking cues from fast friends Mogwai (as well as latter-day Talk Talk records); Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys was an album of titanic, dub-influenced tracks that pushed the ten-minute mark. The band's single sides necessarily waned to one song per, before the group moved away from the format, but the early forays from 1998 included on disc two-- the \x93Filmed Initiative\x94 and \x93Year of the Occasional Lull\x94 singles-- contain three of the best tracks Hood have recorded. The first 7\x94 captured early, experimental fusions of slow 70s jazz, dub and American post-rock acts like Slint, one of the best standalone singles to come out of the UK underground in ages. While its B-side is a meandering Spectrum/Labradford drone, \x93Year Of The Occasional Lull\x94 absolutely predicts Minotaur Shock and Four Tet, a superb collision of acoustic guitar and processed beats, hugely original for the time. Though the sound is sadly a tired staple these days, it points up what fantastic material Hood put together without much reinforcement from critics or fans, and more than explains why Domino leapt to sign them on.

Most of the dozen unreleased tracks tacked on to the second disc are oddly well-produced acoustic numbers from Hood's time of moving forward, discarded in favor of new directions. These eager, earnest shoegaze skiffles are remarkable in comparison to the dirtier recordings they first released, sounding much more like their admittedly chief influence at the time, New Zealand's still languishing This Kind Of Punishment (their records, reissued in 1993 on the once excellent but now defunct Ajax Records, are again out of print). \x93Innocence\x94, \x93To Emphasize Words\x94 and \x93The Go-Betweex94 in particular outshine the handful of good tracks from the band's forming days of disc one, and point toward a recent torchbearer for this sound, Bella Uniox92s Czars.

The single-disc Compilations 1995-2002 is of course a far more succinct retelling of Hood's past, moving within three tracks from the Piano Magic of \x93For A Moment, Lost\x94 to their most overt Squarepusher impression, \x93Lo Band Width\x94 (contributed to Further Mutations, the fourth volume in an excellent post-rock/jazz x92 bass series on the Lo imprint). As you might expect, many of the comp cuts arex92t exactly prime grade, ever the dumping grounds for undercooked leftovers. Many of these tracks simply focus too much on the technique or sound that prompted Hood to lay them down, but like the Singles set, Compilations holds a handful of great songs from every mode: the aching, string-backed acoustic march \x93Song of the Sea\x94, the excellent post-rock Smiths jangle of \x93Sound of the Cliché Klaxons\x94 and the Mogwai-lite approach Hood were most famously associated with (\x93I Have It In My Heart to Jump Into The Oceax94).

Closet-cleaning compilations always satisfy the fanatical record-collectors in any band's audience, and in Hood's case there are many stranded stateside fans who've yet to hear these tracks. Still, they arex92t likely to cause much of a stir, even among fans of independent music. With recent efforts leaning heavily toward clicks and cuts (their last record featured cLOUDDEAD's Dose-One), these retrospectives will definitely shock anyone only recently aware of the band via their Aesthetics releases-- I cax92t recommend them to anyone who hasx92t heard and cherished a late-90s Hood record. Preferring that period to their recent infatuation with electronics, I'll certainly be spinning them again.