Hood: Cold House, still the odd one in their own catalogue

Cold House is the record where Hood ran their two habits at once. For most of the 1990s they were a singles band filling 7-inches with tracks shorter than a minute, and a long-form outfit learning to hold a room for six. On their fifth album, released by Domino on 12 November 2001, both instincts share the same ten tracks and forty-six minutes. It is the strangest thing in their catalogue and the one that has worn best. The reissue, out on 13 November, is the first time it has been available on any physical format in over a decade.

Hood formed in Wetherby in 1990 around brothers Chris and Richard Adams, with friends drifting in and out, among them Craig Tattersall and Andrew Johnson of The Remote Viewer. Their early records were limited vinyl singles on small labels; Cabled Linear Traction from 1994 fixed the shape of that period, indie rock beside noise beside a growing interest in electronics. Domino signed them in 1997 and released "Useless", produced by Matt Elliott, and the songs got longer and calmer from there. Rustic Houses, Forlorn Valleys arrived in 1998, The Cycle of Days and Seasons in 1999, both of them unhurried in the way Bark Psychosis and Talk Talk were unhurried. Cold House is what happened when that patience met two rappers from the Anticon collective.

The band recorded it and mixed and post-produced it with Choque Hosein. It is a guitar record that keeps handing the frame to programmers. The credits list Gareth S Brown among the players, Richard Formby on acoustic guitar, Matthew Robson on additional drums and Sarah McWatt on flute, and the flute is worth the paperwork: it turns up like a clear voice in a crowded room. Three of the tracks carry vocals from Doseone and Why? of Clouddead, and the band pulled "You Show No Emotion At All" as a single and expanded it into a promo EP with three non-album tracks.

"They Removed All Trace That Anything Had Ever Happened Here" takes five minutes to say something a tighter band would have said in one, and the title is fair warning about how this record handles resolution. The guitars stay where they land. Programming sits underneath. When the guest verses show up they do not fit neatly: a Yorkshire post-rock band and two outside voices with nothing in common but a taste for the unresolved, sharing one mix. It sounds like a collision somebody chose to leave in.

"You Show No Emotion At All" is the hinge. It gives the guest voice room and then answers it with the band's own restraint, and it is easy to hear why that was the one pulled for a single. "Branches Bare" is the longest thing here at five minutes fifty-five and the most patient. "The Winter Hit Hard" does in four words what the album takes forty-six minutes to do. Then "I Can't Find My Brittle Youth" and "This Is What We Do To Sell Out(s)" land back to back at around three minutes each, the last trace of the singles band, and they cut the record into halves the closing stretch can build from.

The titles in that closing stretch go quiet and domestic. A river curling around a town, lines low to frozen ground, and then, unexpectedly, "You're Worth The Whole World". It is the only unguarded tenderness in the tracklist, and it lands because everything before it held back.

Cold House is for the listener who came to post-rock through its edges rather than its crescendos, the ones who want Bark Psychosis and Talk Talk and a guitar that never quite resolves. It is also the Hood record for anyone who knows Outside Closer from 2005 and never went back through the Domino run. Give it the full forty-six minutes after dark. You will know within two tracks whether the guest verses are the best thing on the record or the thing you tolerate. Anyone who needs a chorus will find it long.

The album's most interesting feature is also its scarcest: three tracks with outside voices in forty-six minutes, and the rest carried by atmosphere alone. The middle asks for patience and does not always repay it. The reissue deals its extras unevenly too. Both physical editions get the A4 booklet of archival images and the new interview with Simon Reynolds, but the three live recordings from a 2002 BBC Radio 3 session are digital only, and the band-curated mixtape, limited to 100 copies, sits with one London shop, World Of Echo.

Domino marked the tenth anniversary in 2011 with the six-disc Recollected box. Twenty-five years on, the case is narrower and stronger than that box made it: Cold House is the Hood record that sounds like two bands who never met and then turn out to be the same one. It holds at 4.5. Start with "You Show No Emotion At All" and stay for the last track.

The tracklist

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