Given Jesse Darlow’s re-emergence as S.B.A just a few weeks ago, I’d falsely assumed that to be the end of People Skills, and yet here we are. Once again, it just goes to show how wrong a person can be… The fellas from Discreet and its associated universe have had a few prior flirtations with Darlow’s creative output, and in honesty a full length together has long felt like an inevitability tantalisingly waiting to happen given both parties shared interests in gauzy, lo-fi downer pop of the NZ lathe cut underground variety - think Dress, the Garbage and the Flowers, Antony Milton and so forth. Several Years Later remains firmly coded in that direction, though is somewhat more soft-focus and ephemeral than ever, an almost translucent, bracingly quiet selection of midnight confessionals performed with the intention of not waking the rest of the house. Amidst those characteristic influences is also the introduction of a gentle psychedelia rooted in the English pastoralism of Flying Saucer Attack and Crescent, and reminiscent at times of a barely amplified Spacemen 3 caught napping in the greenbelt hinterlands of the rural Midlands. Which amounts mostly to sleepy, perhaps narcotised dreamzone drifting, capped off in perfect fashion with closer ‘The Sculptor’, the sort of brilliantly realised lo-fi hymnal that could’ve originated from any point in the past 40+ years from the Great American Underground. After however many years and records, it’s in that pantheon that People Skills resolutely belong.
FFO: Flying Saucer Attack, Windy & Carl, Dress, Maths Balance Volumes, the Garbage and the Flowers
