Buckinghamshire based 5-piece Home Counties started off life as punk upstarts Haze, before 2020 saw them take their lean guitar sound – channeled from NYC’s post punk lineage of Television through to Parquet Courts – and add splashes of colourful synth noise, complimenting singer Will Harrison’s wry social commentary lyrics. The result was their first EP Redevelopment released in September that year, populated with life through a lens songs of the everyday goings on of modern society.
If the sound of that EP was of the band “forming” and finding their feet, then their new EP In A Middle English Town, due for release on February 11th on Alcopop! Records, is the sound of them running at pace. The lean guitars that were very much in the foreground are now cosseted by colourful and whacky synths that inject fun and relieve the static tension of their previous songs, making for a more confident and experimental Talking Heads vibe.
From opener ‘Back To the 70’s’ which mixes Rapture style electro clash, Britpop and spoken word lyrics through the Whitey splurge of ‘Ad Gammon’ to the off kilter psychedelic Sparks flying whirl of ‘Village Spirit’, Home Counties create their own particular brand of Englishness, as “wonk pop for the many, not the few”. It’s an Englishness that explores the ordinariness of village life, with all its paranoia and anxieties, a place where in ‘The Home Counties’ “if they say walls can talk, then so can gnomes”. Historian Alain Corbin’s 19th Century book ‘Village of Cannibals’ about a French village that rounds on and kills a nobleman is the inspiration behind “Village Spirit” making it seem like a “Hot Fuzz” stop off in a modern day Gulliver’s Travels.
Casting a caustic eye over Middle Britain maybe bleak but on their latest EP release Home Counties manage to do so with their tongue firmly in cheek.