Sunday Synthpop Brunch: The Egg

Long before acts like The New Deal started attracting attention with winding, improvised sets in a style perhaps worst described as "jamtronica," Oxford's The Egg blazed the trail by fusing instrumental virtuosity and cutting edge recording technology through two rich, varied albums and a series of rapturously-received (and highly visual) live performances at sundry U.K. music festivals.

One of the most unique (and sadly overlooked) acts to come out of the England during that high-flying period between the ascent of "BritPop" and the arrival of "Girl Power," The Egg (not to be confused with the early-70s prog-rock outfit which lacked a definite article) was formed in 1994 by twin brothers Matt and Ned Scoff (drums and keyboards, respectively) with bassist Dave Gaydon and guitarist Mark Revell filling out the lineup.

From the start, The Egg sounded like two or three different bands mashed into one as funked-out, itchy guitar licks danced madly around a bouncing, busily chattering rhythm section while beautiful, thick sheets of shiny synths and dreamy piano arpeggios cascaded all around. Perhaps due to their music being almost entirely instrumental in nature (and the band being unafraid to break out the synths when the occasion warranted), it was tempting to think of the The Egg as another would-be player in the exploding electronica scene that was moving forward at flank speed in their home country at the time. While such comparisons almost certainly bought the quartet some added notice when electronica was briefly flirting with mainstream popularity in the U.S., The Egg never truly belonged in the same category as their more explicitly beat-driven "contemporaries."

The first and most immediately noticeable difference between The Egg and, say, The Chemical Brothers, is the music itself, which (in the case of the former) was always actually played in real-time by the band rather than programmed on sequencers, samplers or effects boards. Secondly, the Egg's music was fun to listen to, and nowhere near as arms-length perfect (or predisposed to darkness, for that matter) as most of the electronica crossing the ocean at the time. These factors alone made The Egg's debut release Albumen a complete surprise when it appeared stateside in early 1997.

With the exception of Prodigy'sThe Fat Of The Land and The Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, nearly all of the imported electronic music of 1997 that was supposed to break wide open in the U.S. failed to do so. As part of that intended new wave, Albumen went down with the rest of the pack and marked the first and last time The Egg would have an album released in the States. Back home, while the quartet remained a cult-level attraction, their fortunes were beginning to look up by the time their more overtly electronic sounding follow-up (Travelator) album appeared in late 1998. While this second Egg album also failed to dent the U.K. charts, the single "Getting Away With It" managed to make an appearance on the U.K. Top 75 singles list and, if nothing else, gave them a signature song to close out their sets with.

Of course, it was from this very promising stepping stone in their career that The Egg stumbled. Doh! At least in this case, though, the blame does not lie with the band but with their label, which fell victim to that New Era bugaboo called "corporate reorganization." Set carelessly adrift just as they looked ready to make a decent commercial impression at last, The Egg seemed to just vanish into thin air.

Happily, the story does not end there: while researching this post, I discovered to my surprise that the band did not break up at all, but continued recording and performing and released their third full-length album late last year. Titled Forwards, it appears from all accounts that The Egg are still successfully persuing the same dizzying multi-genre approach they have been over the last decade, though with a more chilled-out feel to some of the tracks (many seem to bring up the work of fab French duo Air in comparison).