Six by Seven have been banging their heads against a wall of mainstream indifference for quite a while now. 'The Way I Feel Today' is the Nottingham band's third long-player and initially promises more of their trademark noise-infested beauty - the aural equivalent of being battered into submission by a thug who pauses occasionally to massage your bruises.
It's a heady and often abrasive mix as album opener 'So Close' demonstrates. The melody is there, but it's buried amid layers of guitars. Yet a sea change is apparent in the band's modus operandi, judging by second track 'IOU Love', which may well be the poppiest thing they've ever done and an unabashedly romantic paean.
Away from the white noise, frontman Chris Olley proves that he can do tender as well as he does anger while the shoulder-shrugging observations of 'All My New Best Friends' finds the band digesting and spitting out the machine because they don't like the taste, rather than raging against it as before.
The employment of pianos and strings perhaps best illustrate how the departure of co-founder Sam Hempton has made Six By Seven stop momentarily, reassess and embrace a bigger picture. The Pixies-style noisefest that is 'Speed Is In, Speed Is Out' and the bile-flecked riffing of 'Cafeteria Rats' show they're not about to totally reinvent themselves but these are welcome diversions rather than the whole story.
More than anything else, 'The Way I Feel Today' has an assuredness and an emotional depth so many guitar bands are currently lacking. This is the sound of a band fully on top of their game, still kicking against the pricks but from a different corner, wearing their hearts on their sleeves and making records like their next meal depends on it. If there's any justice, it will at last propel them to the fore and allow them to restore some passion and commitment into an otherwise vapid and self-obsessed mainstream.
