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[21.11.06] [Stevens]
3:AM REVIEW: I AM KLOOT PEEL SESSIONS
 I Am Kloot, BBC John Peel Sessions (Skinny Dog)
"At some point," says Rudge in Alan Bennett's The History Boys, "Carry On films become art just by carrying on." There's a lot of carrying on about I Am Kloot. Once described as looking "done in by life," been through mills attend the words of John Bramwell like an enduring hieroglyphic allegory.
In April 2004, on release of their most recent and best album, Gods and Monsters, Bramwell peered out at a sold out Ritz, dipped his mouth to the microphone and sang the opening lines of 'Coincidence'. "Love may have just come to bury me/But I'm not afraid of what I see." We talk a lot about progress today, we'll put with a lot for this undefined, malleable notion, but as those words seeped out there was a gravity, a break through, not just the band's but everyone's, as though all that's best and highest was parting modern cultural maladies like the Red Sea.
"Go on, Johnny!" the audience began to cry in a moment of profound selflessness echoing Bramwell's gift for stating the truest and asking the most invested. "Watch yourself when you talk to me," he warns on '86 TVs', later demanding without a trace of earnestness, "So what is love, and who am I?" Across these sessions five songs from Natural History bristle free of that record's warped production, b-side 'This House is Haunted' crashes in reaping all that's overdue, 'Proof' radiates as ever, and while compromising none of the original's gnarl 'From Your Favourite Sky' is teased into rare lilts of sensitivity.
We end, fittingly, knowingly, with an early draft of 'Coincidence'. "I thought the band would laugh," Bramwell once told me of that song. "I just sang all I had left." Nobody laughed, it was another moment in a compelling genesis and there will be more because Kloot will carry on, not afraid.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Maxwell Liu is a writer and journalist. He lives in Manchester where he is currently at work on The Nightfisherman, a novel about the painter Alfred Wallis.
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