"Patience" pleads Tim Hann as Oblige draws to a close, and you certainly need a little bit to get the most from I Concur.
Oblige is very much a slow burner of record, it doesn't jump out at you immediately, indeed it will probably take a few listens before you succumb to its charms but the effort is most certainly worth it.
Built around a guitar riff that jangles away prettily like something The Smiths might have come up with on an off day (its OK but it's not great) Hann details the degeneration of a relationship which is going nowhere. To say it's melancholy would be something of an understatement, but seeing as it'll be getting dark early soon, you need a tune like this to listen to as you sit mournfully in your bedroom gazing at all those Camus books you'll never read.
Still patience is a virtue, and Oblige pays off sweetly. Apart from an obvious Smiths influence, it would appear that I Concur like a bit of post-rock. Soaring guitars grab the song by the scruff of the neck about half way through and elevate it to an altogether more ethereal level. It's well worth waiting for, the more you hear it, the more exquisite it becomes. This isn't the building of "emotion" that Coldplay go in for, it's more sincere than that.
B-side Captors is a more straight forward rocker, like Gene with a distortion pedal and while it shows an altogether different side to I Concur, it's the ability to produce an affecting climax on Oblige that really points to a band worth looking out for.
