100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #99 Simian – One Dimension

Released: 2001

You can almost guarantee that when the phrase “criminally underrated” is applied the subject mostly falls into one of two truths. Here, either artist A was fairly rated but just no good, or the alternative was that they were actually supplying the world with all the right stuff, but for whatever reason people just didn’t get it.

Simian fell into latter bracket. Formed in Manchester their line up included future Arctic Monkeys et al producer James Ford and Jas Shaw, their difficult mission statement was according to the latter “To show you could make band music with songs and harmonies, but be into Autechre too”, whilst Ford preferred the vaguer epithet “a kind of prog-psychedelic thing.”

Admittedly this had been territory occupied with some undersold panache by the Beta Band in the decade before. However, proxy signed to a major label when the quartet delivered their first album Chemistry Is What We Are to an unsuspecting public in 2001 it seemed they were otherwise engaged in watching Big Brother.

They might not have wanted it, but it turned out that they really, really should’ve done. Opener One Dimension courted weirdness at first, but once in flow began to mould itself with harmonies borrowed from Pet Sounds and luscious, other wordly dimphs of haunted electronica. Even now, it remains the lost summertime hit the country never knew it was missing. Criminally underrated, the group split three years later, Ford and Shaw going on to form Simian Mobile Disco, which would prove to be a more successful test of being loved’s relationship with actual success.