The Horrors
Strange House (loog)
Quick! You look clever. Come with us to the dressing up box. Right, you wear that Big Black Wig, and I’ll wear this one, while we wait for our hair to grow. Now let’s stick to a diet of celery and black and white scary movies until we look like extras from The Nightmare Before Christmas, with skinny legs and big dark eyes. Good. Now let’s use those clever brains to write things like ‘I imagined myself hacking desperately at a sea of appendages.’ Great! Now we need a soundtrack that sounds like a train hitting another train (underwater). Got it? Fantastic! And now let’s throw all of that together until we’re a glamorous, demented Rocky Horror Show doomfest crushing all logic and sending angular skinny tie indie bands flying out of our nasty, thrilling path. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat!
The Maccabees
Colour It In (Fiction)
Yes, it rains here quite a lot. We’re rubbish at football. And we sometimes form queues for no reason whatsoever. But what we’re really good at – and what The Maccabees have tunnelled into with gusto – is our ability to celebrate ordinariness.
They pillage the swimming pools of England, dive-bombing in lanes, and copping off in the changing rooms; stride into murky discos, grabbing big fat slices of Britlife and putting them to a beat; and leave behind a trail of joyful eccentricities in their wake.
‘I showed you a good time/ Danced all night…/ And was almost sick on you’, they yelp. OK, so it’s not Shakespeare. But we think even he’d be reaching for the Tetleys, adjusting his lace curtains and putting his feet up to an episode of Corrie after listening to this endearing mix.
The Vincent Black Shadow
…Fears in the water (Bodog Music)
On a different day, we’re sure the fact that TVBS sound like a Gwen Stefani-fronted Evanescence would make us want to lie down under a steamroller and be grateful, but the sun is shining and the weather is sweet, and somehow, completely improbably, it works. There’s a light ska-tinged boppiness to their sound, jolly wurlitzers and harmonies appearing all over the place against a backdrop of crunchy guitars, but it’s the warbling of Cassandra Ford on vocals that lifts them into the ‘interesting’ category. Her voice has the range and clarity of Gwen, with some of the same mid-atlantic twanging, but without the bloody yodelling, which makes it possible to listen to more than one of their songs at a time without feeling like you’ve been eating sweets all day and are in the middle of a painful sugar crash. The rules remain unbroken, but there’s some quirky quality here.
Good Charlotte
Good Morning Revival
‘Hello, we’re Good Charlotte. Instead of developing our musical talent, we’ve been hanging out with Paris Hilton and cooing over designer rat-dogs. A new album? Oh, we’re far too busy for that kind of thing. We just thought we’d rehash some of our old stuff, douse ourselves in eyeliner and whack a synth underneath.’
Well, that’s probably what happened. And that’s certainly what it sounds like – a lazy stack of repetitive tunes bemoaning the ‘lifestyles of the rich and the famous’, and defeatedly watch their careers disappear into the wind as a plethora of new bands emerge with something to talk about, other than designer labels.
Oh, and as catchy as new single Get Your Hands Off My Girl is, the sound of middle-class white boy, Joel Madden, boasting about his ‘brass knuckles hanging from my neck and my chain’, makes us want to tear out our eyes, put them in a slingshot and launch a full-scale eyeball attack on the Madden household.
The Electric Soft Parade
No need to be downhearted (Truck Records)
When they first arrived on the scene, Brighton’s ESP were in the vanguard of bands who awoke British guitar music from its slumbers with ‘Holes in the Wall,’ a record gleefully disinterested in traditional ideas of how to make and structure songs which tottered all over the place, stopping and starting like a drunken loon halting mid-rant before pausing, looking round, and then barking ‘and another thing!’ before going off on a tangent. Nowadays we’ve moved on a bit, they’re a few albums in, and this time the hangover seems to have caught up with them. This isn’t a bad thing, but the exuberance has fled their sound – now it’s a gorgeous downtempo affair on the title track, and the truly lovely ‘Secrets’, an acoustic guitar-led lament which sounds like it’s being played alone in the fading light of an old seaside music hall. Occasionally, as on the VERY Ben Folds-y ‘Cold World’, they revive and get jaunty, and ‘Life in the backseat’ motors along nicely, but overall it’s a much more sombre, reflective effort – and more interesting for it. Sitting down, having a coffee and a think definitely suits them.
Manic Street Preachers
Send away the tigers
<enter the Manics, clutching a copy of their first album>
Oh, hello. You’re still here? Really? But you haven’t been all that good since ‘Everything must go’ now, have you? No, put the philosophy book down and tell the truth. Thank you. Right, so what’s the plan to make us pay the slightest bit of notice this time, now you’re all a bit old for the pretty boy punk thing that the Emo boys have nicked off you?
<the Manics hold up the copy of their first album>
What, you went and listened to that again? Well, it was very good. Yes, ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ and ‘You Love Us’ are tremendous, and you had a snarling emotional eloquence that no-one else did. Hang on, is that Nina from the Cardigans hiding behind you? Right, so she sings on ‘Your love alone is not enough’, which sounds like a Belle and Sebastian song. No, that’s OK, it’s a grower. But crikey, ‘Indian Summer’ is ‘Design for Life’ with less strings, you cheeky monkeys! That’s deliberate? Hmmm.
<the Manics skip a couple of tracks>
Ooh, ‘I’m just a patsy’ is great! It’s fresh, and angry, and you sound like you care a bit. So does ‘Imperial Bodybags’! It’s catchy, growling, and absolutely stomps on your last album. Right then, some of the tunes are still a bit patchy, but the stripped down sound and return to your roots works well; a few less nods to ‘Everything…’ and you’ll be laughing. We’re sorry we doubted you – now don’t let us down again.
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