Focus On Nature is the new studio album from celebrated post-psyche singer songwriter Nick Saloman and his band The Bevis Frond. Seventy-five minutes of glorious melodies that span 60s psych, English folk, Seattle art-punks The Wipers, the buzzsaw pop of Dinosaur Jr and Hendrix-esque explorations. There’s always an element of playful Englishness to their music. Heavily influencing the likes of The Lemonheads, Teenage Fanclub, Elliot Smith, Pavement and Dinosaur Jr, the cult icons have produced another off-kilter mix of melodic piano-led melancholy, acoustic ruminations, scratchy garage rock with a punky edge and full-on guitar histrionics. Like its much-praised predecessor, ‘Little Eden’, the new record studies the world’s weariness but fills out a bigger canvas; fast food and global warming, broken hearts and long gone nights out, everyday immortality and being God’s gift all share space. It’s like Townshend at his most thematic; Big Star in all their acoustic glory, perfectly balancing the punky garage rock combo who end up running on ‘Empty’ with Gilmour breaks that elevate it all to grandeur.
