Half a decade ago, three members of ĠENN pitched up in Brighton from their native Malta with a vanload of equipment – stolen by thieves, fairly quickly – and a huge amount of drive, ambition and unflagging enthusiasm for making an international success of things. After acquiring new gear and a new drummer from just up the A23 in Crawley ‘early doors’ and jettisoning their original name of Cryptic Street in 2019, they set about building a loyal fan base which has grown considerably, five years, one LOUD WOMEN Fest and a global pandemic on. In that time they have released a couple of download singles and, in 2021, the excellent Liminal EP, which dropped some pretty heavy hints as to the direction their musical future would take. A couple of years further on, ĠENN’s first full length album, unum, represents the summation of all the hard work the four of them have put into getting to where they are today.
unum offers a very different ĠENN to the one that arrived on our shores, and one that at times is all but unrecognisable from its original format. As their set has evolved, the frenetic disco-punk of early crowd pleasers like ‘Let’s Go Suki’, ‘Duda Dance’ and ‘Damaged’ and slower, more experimental offerings such as the old set openers of ‘Island Blues’ and ‘Be Like You’ has been replaced, both live and on record, by an altogether more ambient soundscape, seldom rising much above midtempo with Lea and Fia’s steady rhythms being a bedrock for Janelle’s treated and cavernously echoed guitars and the frequently whispered, often spoken, vocals of Leona – nowadays frequently augmented on stage (and on several of unum’s tracks) by the freeform saxophony of Oli Genn-Bash. No longer an all-out, non-stop ball of audio and visual energy, ĠENN’s repositioned musical persona has knocked on the door of the home of shoegaze and has been welcomed inside and fully embraced. This gradual shift of musical focus will not have pleased everyone, I’m sure, but hey, it’s ĠENN’s journey and as with all journeys that divert onto new paths, some people are bound to be left behind as new passengers join their musical train. Given that unum has already made the Top 40 of the official Independent Charts, it’s safe to assume that more and more newbies are doing just that all the time.
unum is definitely an album that benefits from a few listens, but it’s also a rewarding listening experience for any and everyone who perseveres. In the course of getting to know it better I’ve played it 15-20 times and the more plays I’ve given it, the easier it has become to regard the individual eleven tracks (a couple of which are instrumental) as separate entities rather than one long song broken down into just short of a dozen ‘movements’. (The inclusion of a lyric sheet has been useful in that respect, due to the depth at which Leona’s vocals are frequently buried in an absolute pea souper of a mix that often hides them behind a massive wall of twang). If you’ve heard the four singles that the band has already issued from the album, beginning with perhaps its most commercial song (and unum’s opener) ‘Rohmeresse’ a year ago this week, and coming through ‘Days And Nights’, ‘A Reprise (That Girl)’, ‘Calypso’ to their most recent ‘The Sister Of’ (with its accompanying short film, shot in Ukraine) and have enjoyed them, the other seven pieces on the album plough a very similar furrow and you will find them every bit as enjoyable. That’s not to say they all sound the same because they don’t. However there is an unseen but definitely heard spiritual connection between all of unum’s songs, and it is one that defines ĠENN as a band as we all head into the last few weeks of 2023.
You can pop down your local record shop (or head over to Bandcamp) and invest in a copy of unum in the knowledge that your ears are in for a most satisfactory 40 minutes.
The quartet has just completed a tour of record shops up and down the country to launch the album, but they will be back out on the road very early next year with a headlining tour that is still being finalised but that should cover the whole of the UK by the end of February.