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	A photograph of a long dead relative reveals what could be you in years to come. Instead of shuddering at the eerie portentousness you visualise a sepia past pointing to an unknown future. It represents a moment captured in time, yet with its fluidity intact, enhanced even. The music of …Bender occupies a similar state of flux, something particularly evident in their only recording live. To paraphrase Jack Kerouac, the first take is always the best. The group is the creative mind weld of artist/filmmaker Geraldine Swayne, renowned musician James Johnston, and music photographer Steve Gullick. They regard the exercise of bending as an injection of total creative freedom. Great music must inhabit change, cannot be tied down to restrictive practise, and they fully comprehend this. By bridging the gap between past and future, without doing anything so prosaic as clinging to the present, …bender create vistas wherein it is unclear what is just around the corner. Their debut collection, ‘Run Aground’, is a document of a band searching for where they want to be; that it sounds as if they are already there is testament to the record’s inherent brilliance. At its heart twists the death rattle organ groan of “Join Us,” beckoning the listener to crawl back inside the womb, offering reprieve from life’s end credits: “Join us / It’s warm in here / It’s dark in here.” Nothing is being hurried, each and every track is given room to breathe. "Riding North" is Echo And The Bunnymen’s ‘Killing Moon’ slowed to a vampiric pulse. “Misguided / My compass is broke / Map’s on fire,” fall Steve’s words; the tools of navigation have been lost, forcing instinct to come into play. …Bender ultimately operate within a realm of dusty Americana that has been shorn of atavistic limitations and opened up as suppurating wound. Invited to play at Tate Britain, ancient but unrecognisable faces peer down at them in impotent rage, coveting …Bender’s position outside of immutable time. The band are oblivious, concerned only with their uncertain path: “Still riding / Fuck knows which way / Fuck knows why.” In the end it matters not, since their destination is the journey itself.   STEWART GARDINER/ LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS May 2004