The few singles released by The Mole Men are surely overdue critical review.

Coming from unfashionable Yorkshire they were never likely to receive notice from the London-centric media. However, releasing their heavy, sludgy garage rock just after the rise of glam sealed their fate as not even a footnote in rock history. Inspired by The Troggs, Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, whom they opened for on their first UK tour, The Mole Men took HG Wells' subterranean Chubbs as influence too, as lead singer and bass player Winston Bennett pushed the band to ever lower depths of sound. Allegedly inspired by an acid trip up on Keithdown Hill looking down on his hometown of Leighs Pike, Bennett conceived of a kind of beneath ground sound amplified and spread through the land itself. Though he later dismissed this idea as being the fanciful imaginings of his enhanced consciousness, still the band liked the idea enough to pursue it through four glorious singles released on the local Wow! label. After failing to convince the local mine owners to allow them to record on their land, The Moles took it upon themselves to alter their vision to a somewhat more agrarian one and piled their amps into a local cave. Their first sessions were nixed before they begun when they neglected to bring enough equipment to plug in all of their amps and their rudimentary two-track recorder. Undaunted, and arguably revelling in this crude lack of logistial nous, they recorded on a single track, leaving aside the second for the later addition of vocals. Displaying either a gleeful viciousness or no comprehension of where the vocals would slot in, their first release Groove is a heavy, slab of what might be called doom, if not for the sheer joy with which the Moles abuse their instruments. That is, if it's possible to play a virtually single note bassline in a gleeful manner. Guitarist J. Davison meanwhile lays down thick, echoing sheets of noise punctuated by sharp treble stabs on the changes. Drummer K. Pearce lavishes so much attention on his floor tom that it's possible to surmise he generally forgot about his snare, hitting it seemingly only when the mood takes him, rather than in any kind of rhythmic manner. With this wall of cacophony in full flow, there was never going to be any place to mix the vocals. This dilemma being solved through the addition of so much studio echo as to render the lyrics indecipherable. No big loss, judging by future efforts, though it does handily answer the question of what My Bloody Valentine would have sounded

like had they listened to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath endlessly before recording Loveless.