Interlaker: Apricot Vinyl LP

Anyone who has loved rock music over the last decade or so will be familiar with David Jakes and Jack Wrench. Jakes was the broodingly intense singer with Lonely The Brave; a complex character blessed with a once-in-a-generation voice. And Wrench was the explosive drummer with Arcane Roots, a man equally at home with math-rock complexity and sheer rock power.
  
Jakes and Wrench – who only knew each other vaguely from their previous bands – brokered their new partnership on Instagram; exchanging casual messages, discovering a mutual love of REM and Pearl Jam, before progressing to swapping demos and song ideas, eventually writing and recording their brilliant debut album entirely online. They met in person once towards the end of the process, Jakes says, just to “make sure we got on well together, and it was all good – otherwise it would have been awkward!”
 
Songs such as The Hunger and Ghostride summon up elemental rock muscle in a way that few have been able to muster in recent times, while Call Out The Wolves and Coming Out have a grasp of rock dynamics that could more than hold their own alongside their grunge-era heroes. 

“We both approached recording the album with a zero-pressure attitude,” asserts Wrench. “We were both just up for writing music again.” That method allowed Jakes, who holed up in his parents’ house over the summer to record his parts solo, to “put everything on the line” in his performances, recording as and when the mood struck, in his constant quest for vocal perfection. “I tend to over-analyse everything, but it seemed to work out alright,” says Jakes, with typical self-deprecation. “I’m a bit fixated on my vocals.”
 
He won’t be the only one. His voice, always the purest expression of emotion even amidst a maelstrom of instrumental chaos, scales new peaks throughout the album.
 
The difference this time around is, his range has been extended, pushing his voice into previously unexplored locations. The album also features the positively upbeat likes of End Unknown and Miracle and the fragile beauty of Carving Circles and Be The One, alongside the U2-play-Sabbath alt-rock stridency of Bottomless Pit and Wishes.
   
Make no mistake, Interlaker’s ambitions for the band know few limits, with Jakes targeting “the peaks that Lonely The Brave and Arcane Roots achieved – and beyond”. In a changed environment for rock music, both acknowledge that could take time, but now the duo are back from the brink, they’re determined to build things the right way.

Tracklist:

A1. The Hunger
A2. Ghostride
A3. Call Out The Wolves
A4. Be The One
A5. End Unknown
 
B1. Spite Of Day
B2. Miracle
B3. Coming Out
B4. Carving Circles
B5. Bottomless Pit