“Sitting on a sofa, cigarettes and beer, ten years disappear…agreeing to agree, just to get along.” By going into the difficulties of resuscitating the past, the lyrics of “Ten Years,” the fourth song on The Loft’s first album, neatly sum-up the band’s current situation. The final line gives the 10-track set its title: “Everything changes, everything stays the same.”
Everything Changes, Everything Stays The Same is, indeed, the first album by The Loft, a band integral to the early days of Creation Records which fell apart on stage in June 1985. Forty years ago. A long time. Before that rupture, the band issued two singles with seven tracks spread across them. Now, they are followed up.
It’s appropriate then that these 10 new songs sound reassuringly like The Loft, albeit with a toughened-up sound. There’s the Television-like spiralling solo guitar which was present back then, and the sense of a band anglicising a facet of Dylan-esque New York art rock; one smoothing-off the edges of Richard Hell and the Voidods. Contrasting with the bright, energised playing the lyrics can exhibit a world-weariness. Album opener “Feel Good Now” begins with the pronouncement “I’m bored, I’m bored looking at the wall, I’m a hungry ghost and I want more” and goes on to declare “I don’t want to feel good tomorrow, Want to feel good now, Bring the bottle over here, Pour it out drink it down.”
The Loft’s refraction of rock archetypes coloured the bands former members started in the wake of the 1985 split: The Weather Prophets, The Caretaker Race and The Wishing Stones. The solo releases by singer/songwriter Peter Astor too. This meant the band left an imprint after their demise, a resonance which came into focus when The Loft sporadically resurfaced: a reunion over 2005 and 2006; another in 2015. Then, two years ago, a radio session was followed by the recording last summer of what’s become the very welcome though belated Everything Changes, Everything Stays The Same. Despite the disjointed timeline, there is a continuity.
Fortunately, The Loft have never referenced contemporaneous trends. Forty years ago they were out of context. It’s the same now. The result? A timeless freshness. As the title says, Everything Changes, Everything Stays The Same.
