A Supergroup That Actually Works: The Hard Quartet

Glasgow-based musician and writer Alex Neilson (Alex Rex, Trembling Bells) winds the clock back to 2024 to chat about a Supergroup that actually works.

How do you like your supergroups? Ill-judged publicity stunts collapsing under their own chutzpah? Ageing also-rans looking for one last roll of the dice? Well, for every CSNY there’s a FFS. And for every Travelling Wilbury’s there’s a… well, the Wilburys were as patchy as Freddy Krueger’s winter mittens (I’ve often imagined Dylan grinding his teeth to Twiglet dust when the Big O sings “Well it’s alright even when push comes to shove/ if you’ve got someone to love” on the Wilbury’s maniacally cloying End of the Line). You’re often left with the sense that writing-by-committee can leave everyone feeling compromised and diminished. Turns out it’s hard to build the ideal city with skyscrapers alone.

Indeed, some members of The Hard Quartet (Emmett Kelly, Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney and Jim White) have been in what can be described as supergroups before. Sweeney was a member of Billy Corgan’s short-lived vanity-vehicle Zwan (the writing was zwan the wall, amid reports of documentary camera crews attending from the first rehearsals). Emmett Kelly’s star has been rising for a long time as the superlative guitarist with Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Ty Segall. Jim White is the iconoclastic drummer of the Dirty Three, whose style is as much akin to German Expressionist painting as it is percussion. And Steve Malkmus needs little introduction as a founding member of Pavement and recurring member of Silver Jews.

The constituent parts are all good in practice, but what about the theory? The Hard Quartet Globe Trotters are pulling some interesting shapes, but can they handle it on a cold Tuesday night on a Bluetooth stereo in Glasgow? Turns out the answer is an emphatic and unequivocal yes.

From the opening slurred chords of Chrome Mess, the dial is set to: “FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK”. The song spills out of itself with Kelly and Malkmus trading vocal lines like an adrenalised Lady Godiva’s Operation as White’s drums gallop in multiple directions at once like a pantomime horse pulling itself apart. Earth Hater has a similarly marauding energy with sloppy riffs finger-painted onto the hull of a vast and irresistible machine until the whole thing shifts into a typically Malkmusian toy-town chorus “Unto other’s you must do, as you would have them do to you”.

But it’s not all locomotive sludge and chicken blood, the band do a fine line in elegiac beauty too. Rio’s Song is a gorgeous sunburst of a tune with corkscrew guitar lines and tumbling drums scaffolding Sweeney’s lead vocals, which are heart-bruising in their vulnerability. Elsewhere,with its chiming syncopations and kaleidoscopic harmonies, the Kelly-helmed Our Hometown Boy is not so much reminiscent of The Byrds as what you hoped The Byrds actually sounded like. It’s visceral, juiced-up and sloppy but with a tender heart and enviable smarts.

The Hard Quartet’s eponymous debut contains all the messy, confounding joy of Dirty Three and Pavement and makes you remember not only what you loved about those bands, but what you love about music in general. And, dear reader, that is borderline miraculous for a desiccated old fossil like your humble narrator.