Album Reviews | Music Boats

Welly: Big In The Suburbs review – puts the fun back in British indie rock
21
Mar

Welly’s debut album is winningly silly, although its political satire feels a little too safe, and the comedy in Elliot Hall’s cartoonish vocals wears thin quickly.

“It’s very serious, at least it is later on, and you’re not to laugh at the serious bits,” a pompous presenter tells us at the start of Welly’s debut album. “I’ll tell you when that comes.” It’s as good a manifesto as any for this lively indie upstart with a penchant for wry observations of modern life in the vein of witty Americans Cheekface, as well as their ever popular British indie peers Sports Team.

Elliot Hall leads the charge, delivering absurd character portraits and the occasional political barb with a nasally yelp à la Squid’s Ollie Judge, yet somehow even more cartoonish. His delivery adds rowdiness to Big in the Suburbs’ noisier numbers (‘Home For the Weekend’, ‘Deere John’), but risks becoming headache-inducingly irritating over the course of a 50-minute album.

It helps that the words he’s singing are interesting, mixing quickfire puns with political takedowns. “She’s fallen in love with a gameshow host / The chase was on, but it’s pointless now,” the self-assured title track offers, before turning its attention to the more serious matters of the housing crisis and “nationalised hate”. ‘Shopping’ is a shrewd dissection of modern consumerism, even if Hall’s vocal delivery sounds like a whiny nine-year-old throwing a tantrum.

Punky and ragged single ‘Deere John’ attacks a lonely, alcoholic husband (“You’re too old for nightlife!”), whilst ‘Soak Up the Culture’ turns its scorn to self-obsessed gap year girls. It’s all entertaining enough, but also feels only surface-level deep, cheaply mocking the symptoms of inequality and social malaise rather than attempting the trickier task of pinning down the root causes.

That said, fans who dismiss Welly based on Big In the Suburbs’ patchy first half will miss this album’s surprising shift in tone in the second half. Album highlight ‘Pampass Grass’ sounds like a distorted ABBA rendition, succeeding in telling a series of tragic character portraits whilst also making it all irresistibly danceable. “I’ve got to get out!” Hall belts in endearing disco number ‘The Roundabout Racehorse’ whilst ‘Family Photos’ intriguingly hints at personal struggles behind Hall’s comic showman, although the meek outro exposes his vocal frailties.

In the end, Big In the Suburbs doesn’t quite marry Hall’s love of political satire with his desire to deliver something more emotionally impactful. Often the album’s many characters feel deliberately shallow and archetypal, lyrical strawmen for Hall to fire his witty one-liners at. The result is fun and entertaining, but recoils from offering something more meaningful or artistically vulnerable.

It’s exemplified in the spoken word piece ‘Under Milk Wood’, a poignant poem about zooming out from life’s fine-grained chaos and observing a sleeping town from a neutral, god-like perspective. “From where you are, you can hear their dreams… or something like that,” the speaker concludes, tossing away his profound musings behind a protective barrier of laughter and irony. Yes, Hall is a sharp humourist, but Big In the Suburbs leaves you wishing Welly stopped shying away from all those ‘serious bits’.

Courting: Lust for Life review – overwrought concept album pulls its punches
17
Mar

The Liverpool band’s drive for creative risk-taking is admirable, but the experiment doesn’t pay off on this disappointingly messy and scant third album.

Depending on your perspective, Courting’s new album, Lust for Life, Or: ‘How to Thread the Needle and Come Out the Other Side To Tell the Story’ was always destined to be genius or disastrous. Frontman Sean Murphy-O’Neill was clear about his ambitions in his interviews before release day: there would be a ‘mirrored’ track list (each song has a musically-related pair), a promise of multiple lyrical ‘Easter eggs’, an overriding theme of duality exemplified by the two figures on the monochrome cover art and that exhausting two-part album title.

In a rock landscape of unadventurous yet ever successful 2000s indie revivalists – I’m looking at you, Circa Waves – it’s hard to fault Murphy-O’Neill’s drive to deliver a high-art modern rock classic. Last year’s New Last Name came with a grand love narrative, but really it was all about a few stellar singles, not least Flex, which brilliantly conveyed the blissful ignorance of youth, sounding a bit like Carly Rae Jepsen if she made rock for teen boys rather than pop for teen girls.

It’s a disappointment, then, that the new album trailered as the culmination of Courting’s ‘evolution’ thus far weighs in at a meagre 25 minutes and eight tracks, two of which are instrumental tone-setters. O’Neill has talked about the band’s newfound search for conciseness but on this, their third album in a little over three years, the end result just feels rushed and underwritten. The lyrical cross-references and much-touted “hidden depths” are no doubt bountiful, but it’s a shame that Courting couldn’t spend more time fleshing out their numerous intriguing ideas.

Divorce: Drive to Goldenhammer review – endearing, open-hearted folk-rock
7
Mar

Framed around a quest to the fictional place of ‘Goldenhammer’, the Nottingham indie band’s impressive debut is packed with one gorgeous duet after another, plus a wealth of plaintive melodic earworms.

Goldenhammer, the destination of the journey Divorce take throughout their brand new album, categorically doesn’t exist. Instead, the band see it as a sort of personal nirvana. “It’s this intangible idea of something that you yearn for and want,” vocalist Tiger Cohen-Towell told Rolling Stone recently. The concept of Goldenhammer breezes in and out with subtlety throughout the Nottingham band’s excellent debut record, more evident in the yearning melodies and uplifting harmonies than in concrete lyrical references.

Having drummed up a buzz from two promising EPs in 2022 and 2023, Drive to Goldenhammer feels like Divorce’s coming-of-age moment, and boasts a maturity and cohesion not found on their previous work. The band have listed Belle & Sebastian and Queen as key influences, but the occasional wayward fiddles and elegant melodies recall recent Adrienne Lenker songs, or perhaps Black Country, New Road in their more cool-headed moments.

Surely the main draw of Divorce over those esteemed artists is the delightful vocal chemistry of co-vocalists Cohen-Towell and Felix Mackenzie-Barrow. Sonically, they’re a delicious match: Mackenzie-Barrow’s tenor rich and slightly gravelly, Cohen-Towel light and youthful, although capable of an almighty pop-punk belt when the song demands it. The pair have been writing songs together since they were teenagers, and you can tell in the dovetailing melodies of opener Antarctica, touchingly echoing each other with the words “I was made to love you”. The duo aren’t, as far as I can tell, actually in a relationship, but Drive to Goldenhammer’s plentiful male-female vocal duets give the record’s musings on love a certain completeness, like two sides of a relationship mirroring back their fears and hopes to each other. Tellingly, lyrics are expressed from the perspective of “we” almost as often as “I”.

Recorded over four seasons in an off-grid location in the Yorkshire Dales, Drive to Goldenhammer has an earthy, faintly nostalgic quality to it. It’s most clearly heard in the atmospheric accordion that opens Old Broken String or on the shimmering, hook-packed Hangman, a song about Mackenzie-Barrow’s day job as a social care worker. Understated stunner Parachuter contains a sighing chorus melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Phoebe Bridgers ballad. “Cry your eyes out, we’ll be leaving soon,” they sing nihilistically, the harmonies sounding simultaneously heavenly and desolate.

That said, Divorce are not ones to rest on their laurels. Lord front-loads the album with a bulletproof power pop chorus that arrives like a bolt from the blue, whilst late highlight Where Do You Go features a furious performance from Cohen-Towell, chastising an emotionally unavailable lover over a salvo of gilt-edged guitar hits. Glorious synthpop number All My Freaks sees Cohen-Towell on more playful form, mocking the plight of indie musicians like herself on a glittery chorus so primed for this summer’s festivals you can practically hear the giant balloons and confetti descend over the adoring crowd.

Drive to Goldenhammer’s more ambitious moments aren’t always so successful, and that central idea of a quest towards Goldenhammer often feels lost in the noise. The Queen influences are clear in the dense composition of Fever Pitch, but the end result feels overwritten and somewhat aimless, whilst Karen works it’s way up to a thrilling wall of sound and then bottles it with a strait-laced guitar solo. Much more intriguing is Cohen-Towell’s central opus Pill, which theatrically switches from psychedelic, innuendo-filled art rock to a poignant, piano-led memory of swinging from a bunk bed with a childhood friend. It’s the sort of unorthodox songwriting Divorce had no time for in their previous EPs, and Pill’s unpredictable switch lands an emotional sucker punch.

Perhaps even more so than the fictional nirvana of Goldenhammer, a sense of openness and emotionally vulnerability runs through almost every track on this record. “Loving you with open arms / Kissing you with open eyes,” the pair sing in cathartic unison on Jet Show, whilst Adam Peter-Smith’s guitar and Kasper Sandstrom’s drums sound endearingly rough around the edges. This honesty and degree of youthful naivety masks the shrewd songwriting that underlines Drive to Goldenhammer. Divorce may not have reached their musical paradise just yet, but with this gorgeous record they’re halfway there.

Sam Fender: People Watching review – the Geordie Springsteen delivers a classic
3
Mar

Valorised Geordie hero Sam Fender paints a vivid picture of ordinary working-class life in this extraordinary third record. Never has Fender’s trademark brand of melancholic beauty sounded so potent.

Icount myself lucky to be living in Newcastle during a Sam Fender album rollout. No other release this year will compare. Spend enough time in the city centre and you’ll notice it. Fender-branded scarves adorn the windows of souvenir shops. Fender’s image literally lights up Grey’s Monument from a dazzling LED billboard. Fender melodies are duly pumped through the Tannoy at St James’ Park after every match, the entire city singing to the same hymn sheet. Indeed, in this part of the world only the local football club is more universally adored than this former barman from North Shields.

If his 2019 debut announced Fender as a promising indie hopeful, the follow-up, Seventeen Going Under, confirmed his status as one of British rock’s leading lights. It was a record powered by a career-defining title track, a deeply moving reflection on a working-class upbringing in the North East destined to go down as one of the great rock hits of the 2020s (and it was Undertone‘s Song of the Year 2021, no less). It remains just about the closest thing Tyneside has to its own national anthem.

How could Fender possibly follow a track like Seventeen Going Under? The lead single and title track to People Watching suggested he was hoping for lightning to strike twice with another sequence of sonorous, hypnotic chord changes and more poetic lyrics about the everyday struggles many Tynesiders face. This time the chirpy guitar hook sounds perilously close to a mid-ranking 1975 hit, but Fender’s knack for bleakly beautiful depictions of his hometown would be enough to make even Matty Healy jealous. The bridge’s “Above the rain-soaked Garden of Remembrance / Kittiwakes etched your initials in the sky” is sublime even by Fender’s high standards.

It’s a relief, then, that the subsequent album doesn’t merely attempt to recreate Seventeen Going Under, but expands on its themes of deprivation in the North East and the distant politicians responsible for it. Chin Up is one of many songs that devotes much of its time to painting deft character portraits of ordinary Geordies. “The cold permeates the neonatal baby”, he sings starkly, before finding parallels between Detroit’s urban decay and Byker Bridge in Crumbling Empire. It might all sound rather doom and gloom on paper, but warm beds of layered guitars and a steady tide of lush strings sections drench this record in a delicate beauty. The people Fender describes are suffering, yes, but in those soaring melodies there’s a sense that their hope is unextinguishable.

Complicating this album about poverty is Fender’s own unescapable wealth and fame. “I won’t take this world for granted”, he assures us at one point, whilst devastating closer Remember My Name – which poignantly features the Easington Colliery Brass Band – reminisces Fender’s own council house upbringing. Most fascinating is TV Dinner with its sinister piano manoeuvres that evoke Radiohead’s other-worldly classic Everything in Its Right Place. “Grass-fed little cash cow”, Fender calls himself in a blistering vocal performance, as a fog of electronics and strings steadily engulf him. It’s a thrillingly dark composition which, for once, defies Fender’s usual comparisons to Springsteen and hints at an intriguing possible direction for album four.

Massive, raspy sax solos and an atmosphere of nostalgia remain Fender’s biggest draw, however. Arm’s Length‘s harmonies may sound unadventurous, but they lend the song a muted, sepia sheen, playing out like a half-forgotten memory. Most of People Watching’s songs pick a timeless chord progression and blissfully wallow in it for an unhurried five minutes, a formula which Fender has now honed.

For all the lyricism about decay, regret and fear, the overriding quality of People Watching is staggering beauty. “These purple days left a violent mark on the oak tree hollow”, Fender offers on glorious standout Nostalgia’s Lie, nailing his trademark balance of piercing sorrow and dewy-eyed wistfulness. The melodies feel inevitable, and Fender’s honeyed vocal tone has never sounded sweeter. Equally remarkable is Little Bit Closer, an awe-inspiring stadium rock triumph about finding God, complete with one of the most nagging chorus hooks you’ll hear all year. “I can’t live under the notion that there’s no reason at all for all this beauty in motion,” the spine-tingling group vocals belt. After listening to an album as deeply beautiful as this one, you’d tend to agree.

Ezra Collective: Dance, No One’s Watching review – jazz champions play to their strengths
7
Oct

The jazz group that set the Mercury Prize alight last year return with an album that goes all in on infectious dance grooves. Their knack for melody seems to have been forgotten in the party, but this bloated record does conclude with the most moving track of this band’s career.

The level of study I devote to albums reviewed on this blog varies, but sometimes, like with this latest Ezra Collective album, I take my journalistic duties to give the entire record a fair hearing seriously: I sit down in a darkened room save for a dim desk lamp, scribbling details of every track in a notepad and staring blankly at Spotify as the highlighted song title gradually works its way down the track list. It took about 20 minutes of listening to Dance, No One’s Watching before I properly read the album title writ large across the top of the screen. Alone on a rainy night in my bedroom, it felt like an instruction addressed directly to me. In fact, cowering over a desk is the exact opposite effect of Ezra Collective’s third album which is, unsurprisingly, a heartfelt ode to the power of dancing.

Ezra are labelled a jazz act – and are the most commercially successful act in the nebulous genre of UK jazz by some margin – but anyone who’s seen the five Londoners take to a stage since their emergence five years ago will know compulsive dance grooves have always been an essential part of this band’s appeal. Their performance at last year’s Mercury Prize (fittingly of a song called Victory Dance) had the attendees in the cabaret seating setting aside their glasses of champagne to clap and frug along to the infectious Latin groove like the band members themselves. It was a joyful musical fireworks show that seemed to render the competition a forgone conclusion. Ezra Collective were destined to be the Mercury Prize’s first jazz champions, and they showed up ready to claim the trophy.

Unfortunately their follow-up album, Dance, No One’s Watching lacks a track quite as thrilling as Victory Dance, but there’s no shortage of peppy Afrobeat grooves to move your hips to. The standout is Ajala, named after a legendary Nigerian journalist who was so busy with his travels his name became Yoruba slang for someone who can’t sit still. It is a fittingly up-tempo, restless number, with Ife Ogunjobi and James Mollison’s skipping melodies played in blunt unison – Ezra Collective are a band far more concerned with delivering a straightforward good time than trying any fiddly counterpoint or melodic harmonies. Ajala has groove in buckets, but what it’s lacking is everything else that makes for a good jazz composition, namely an interesting B section (here the melody simply drops out for 16 bars) and a wild solo.

Ajala is far from the only track where Ezra Collective’s tunnel vision on producing a danceable groove leaves the melodies feeling underwritten. N29 is essentially just one (admittedly very funky) bass riff lacking in hardly any musical development at all, let alone a melody to hold on to. Opener The Herald starts promisingly enough, but again it’s as if they’ve forgotten to write half of the chorus, and Ogunjobi’s trumpet solo is given no room to grow. The devotion to a rock solid groove is admirable – and brothers Femi and TJ Koleoso are without a doubt one of the tightest drum and bass duos in the business – but it should be possible for a funky, repetitive groove and interesting harmonic shifts to exist in the same song.

Intriguingly, Yazmin Lacey and Olivia Dean’s featured tracks – two of the very finest voices on the UK jazz scene – offer a relatively restrained take on the dance-focused thesis. Lacey’s smoky tones are a fine match for the tender horn lines on God Gave Me Feet For Dancing, but with no-nonsense lyrics like “Give me bass line / Give me dollar wine” it’s odd the band don’t rise above a muted throb all song. Dean’s track, No One’s Watching Me is slinkier and sexier and features Ogunjobi’s best solo on the record – each note placed with unusual restraint and care – although Dean’s chorus is scant.

Further down a bloated track list, Shaking Body and Expensive offer a purple patch. The former is pure Ezra Collective joy and a natural successor to Victory Dance, with a Latin hook bubbly enough to justify its many repeats. Mastermind of the keyboard Joe Armon-Jones offers luscious jazz voicings typical of his brand of frantic genius, and Femi Koleoso’s hammering of the ride cymbal in the chorus is a joy to behold. Expensive improves on the light-footed Afrobeat of the record’s first half with intelligent, patient sax and trumpet solos that prove Ogunjobi and Mollison have done their jazz homework, moving beyond the crowd-pleasing screeches found on their most raucous party starters.

The penultimate track appears at first to be some surplus jazz musings from Armon-Jones on piano, but the song is called Have Patience for a reason – Everybody immediately follows, a magnificent album closer and one of the most beautiful tunes the band have ever penned. In an album lacking in strong melodies, here is a beauty: an elegant, sighing rise and fall, shimmering within Armon-Jones’ textured piano chords before emerging in a solemn trumpet line and, rousingly, a distant choir. Before long, Obunjobi and Mollison are up to what they do best – rapturous, euphoric improvisations that come together and fall apart again like two birds in flight. It’s a piece ripe for crowd participation and a poignant marker of how far they’ve come: a band with collective in the name, experts at uniting audiences from summer festivals to glamorous awards shows through dance and crowd participation. Dance, No One’s Watching may not go down as their finest record, but that precious Ezra Collective spirit remains alive and well.

Cobra Spell: 666 review – kick-ass hair metal runs wild
16
Aug

An outrageously eye-catching album artwork marks the debut the of the brand new, all female lineup of Sonia Anubis’ Cobra Spell. Alex Walden checks out to their latest album to see if they could produce that rare magic: genuinely fresh-feeling music inspired by the 80s.

If turning 20 taught me one thing, it’s that all the stuff that you gave up as a teenager to “fit in” suddenly becomes really cool again. For me, it all hit after three months spent in New York to which I returned with the urge to swap my skateboard for a guitar. It was while browsing for a new axe that I came across an advertisement from Jackson Guitars which showed Cobra Spell founder and lead guitarist Sonia Anubis absolutely shredding her custom made “Warrior from Hell” to Cobra Spell’s leading single, The Devil Inside of Me.

Now I was impressed, but it was the next day when the magic hit as I found myself still thinking about that video over and over again. I couldn’t remember how the solo went, hell I couldn’t even remember Sonia Anubis’ name, but something about the brief build up to the solo before it all came crashing down in such a spectacular fashion was stuck in my head. After a few hours of not being able to shake it, I decided to bite the bullet and download Cobra Spell’s 666 to see if I could shake the brainworm from within my head. Yet as I delved deeper, I found myself feeling this sense of joy and excitement that I haven’t felt in a long time.

The 80’s are back! (sort of)

Ok so let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room. This album reeks of 80’s glam metal. Anytime I write about anything to do with classic or hard rock, I find myself always saying the same thing about how rock is well past it’s best by date and unfortunately the glory days of the genre are well and truly behind us. That being said, you can imagine the feeling of dread as I read “Heavy rock band stuck in the 80s” in Cobra Spell’s Instagram bio as any rock fan knows that if a band describes themselves as being “stuck in the 80s” then it’s highly likely that they’re extremely mediocre. But man did I eat my words… and man was I happy about it.

Cobra Spell have managed to capture that epic, badass, bedroom poster, no fucks given aspect of 80s glam metal that we all secretly love, even if we don’t acknowledge it yet. With brash song titles like S.E.X, Satan is a Woman and The Devil Inside of Me, you can’t help but feel the rawness behind the album purely from the titles alone. Yeah we all know someone who is going to question us for listening to songs with such vulgar titles, but that’s what makes it so good; It’s excitingly rebellious while also shamelessly fun.

It’s fast, it’s fun, but most importantly, it’s freeing

Despite it’s heavy metal lyrical roots, this project is not all about Devil worshipping and Satan, for it’s when you look into the lyrics of the album that you realise how the devilish themes are merely a front for the messages of female empowerment, as quoted by Sonia Anubis herself in an interview for Metal Remains.

“The album is about rebellion, it’s about women in power… it’s some kind of liberation of expression for women, liberation of sexuality and also a celebration as an all-female formation.”

And it’s that exact feeling that passes on through the music. Just from looking at lyrics such as “I am your drug, you’re addicted” ,“Don’t want to give you expectation, don’t be a fool to my sensations” from S.E.X. and “Why do you try on her, if you know, you know that she’s too much for you” from Bad Girl Crew we get this sense of empowerment for women. These songs aren’t about sex and Satan so it can annoy your grandparents, these are songs about women finally feeling liek the sexy queens that they are. In a music space where the stereotype is men touring the world bagging any groupie they want, Cobra Spell are flipping that narrative in a positive way.

An audial Pack-a-Punch

While it’s obvious from the first listen that 666 sounds fresh out of the 80s, I must admit that the quality of this album is far from anything to come out of that era. Even I am partial to dusting off the old Ratt, Metallica and Van Halen records from time to time but what bugs me most about them is how I’m instantly reminded that the remastered versions on my phone sound so much better; It makes you wonder why people obsess so much over original pressings of records in the first place.

While yes it’s obvious that due to 40 years of technological advancements it will obviously sound better, you can’t deny how rich this album sounds. From the soft synth backing, to the iconic chug from a down picked guitar string to the fierce nature of Kris Vega’s vocals – with 666, the crisp audio quality goes hand in hand with the clear talent of each member. Normally I love when an album sounds like they’ve just turned everything up to the max so it can wallop your eardrums, but this album sounds as if every specific instrument has been precisely refined so that it compliments everything else. Between the thud of the drums, the rumble of the bass, the squeals of the guitar and the ferocity of the vocals, your brain is left almost scrambled as you’re thrown around between such talented members.

We’ve reached a point in rock music where the kids inspired by the golden era of rock have collided with the technological prowess of the 21st century music industry, and it sounds thick and beautiful.

While I do love the fast-paced tracks within the album, it’s not all kick-ass and take names for the quintet. Songs like Love = Love and one of my personal favourites Fly Away pose as emotional ballads for when you’re not in the mood for rocking the house but still want to listen to something impactful. While the bread-and-butter elements of a rock ballad, such as a prominent singing voice and a slow but moving guitar solo, reign high on these songs. Their prominence is challenged by various hard-hitting backers such as synthesisers, vocal harmonies and even a saxophone solo. I mean come on, when was the last time you heard someone kill a sax solo on a rock ballad?

Cobra Spell has gone through a few lineup changes before, but it really feels like with this one Sonia’s got it right. This album is hot fresh glam metal and there’s no messing with it. It sounds as if this album was born to perform, to blow kids’ and adults’ minds all over the world. With an album this good, it’s a shame that they weren’t around in the 80s as I’m sure that they would’ve done huge numbers. What is certain though is that I know for a fact next time Cobra Spell play in England, I will be there.

SOFT PLAY: HEAVY JELLY review – redemptive riot delivers on all fronts
9
Aug

The Kent punk duo SOFT PLAY hold nothing back on their deafening fifth album. There are ample pulse-quickening riffs to whip up the mosh pit, but also plenty of nuance and introspection to reward repeat listens, not least a tender surprise at its climax.

It’s an unfair cliché that punk music—and loud rock music in general—is all about anger and hatred. Enter a mosh pit at some loud and sweaty bunker-like venue, as I did a few weeks ago in Leeds’ grungy Key Club, and the first thing you’ll notice is apparent violence: limbs flying, bodies separating and then converging at high speed, the occasional boot to the head from a crowd surfer. But the second thing will be the compassion lying just under the surface: the way the chaos stopped for a few seconds when my mosh-loving companion Ewan picked up a reveller who had dangerously ended up on the floor, the way the performers speak of gratitude and love, albeit so passionately they sound enraged. Ultimately, that’s what punk is about: not anger, but straightforward, extreme passion. Indeed, there’s often more camaraderie and mutual respect to be found at a heavy metal gig than at a pretentious jazz concert or your average pop gig where drunken fans bay for the hits. It’s in the lyrics too. IDLES, perhaps the biggest punk group in the country at the moment, recently released an album featuring choruses with savage lyrics like “I really, really love my brother,” and “the gratitude runs through my veins.” Listen too closely, and suddenly punk sounds like a rather schmaltzy love fest.

And yet, sometimes there are songs like the third track on SOFT PLAY’s superb new album, a song tellingly titled Act Violently. It’s a bruising three minutes squarely about vocalist Isaac Holman’s hatred towards reckless e-scooter riders, and he doesn’t hold back. “If I wasn’t such a loving bloke I’d kick your fucking head into the road, cunt,” he rages in the first verse over a tumult of scratchy guitars and swaggering drums. Perhaps Act Violently could be spun as a harmless outlet for rage, a way of safely transposing actual violence into song, but really this is a track all about unadulterated hatred. It’s also a fantastic piece of music. Laurie Vincent’s booming drums splash around the perfectly synced vocals and guitars in the verses, and Holman’s chant of “you make me wanna act violently” makes for one of the catchiest choruses of the year. It helps that Holman isn’t entirely serious in his message, allowing for some humor when a bandmate offers him a cup of tea mid-rant, before eventually getting his sweet revenge and sending that e-scooter rider flying over an uncovered drain hole in the middle eight. It’s a track indicative of HEAVY JELLY as a whole: propulsive and compelling on first listen, but not without its clever nuances and shrewd self-awareness.

The album’s flagship track is undoubtedly Punk’s Dead, a sure-footed lead single about the backlash the band received when they changed their name from Slaves to the ostensibly tame SOFT PLAY in 2022. It was a public response colored by today’s ‘culture wars’, the band being accused of over-the-top political correctness enforced by an apparent army of “liberal lefties.” Rather than simply defending their choice, Holman opts to simply present his opponents’ arguments back at them. “Are there any real men in Britain?” he bellows ironically, before a chorus that reads “I don’t like change / Why can’t you just stay the same?” Those might sound like unexciting lyrics, but a chorus about wanting to stay the same is sacrilege in the world of punk, a genre built on the relentless demand for social and political change. Rather than make his own argument, Holman lets his opponents join up the dots. If the spirit of punk is dead, as they claim, then could they be the ones that killed it? It works as a genius, comprehensive takedown of those who attacked the band for their name change, and what’s more, it’s the biggest hit of their career. For SOFT PLAY, surely Punk’s Dead feels like a perfect victory over their haters.

Holman employs a similar lyrical trick on Mirror Muscles, this time presenting the dangerous body-obsessed world of ‘gym lads’ with little direct criticism, although this time it’s harder to tell whether the band is commenting on the risks of tying your self-worth to your muscle mass, or whether, as they said in a recent interview with Rock Sound, they just really like to work out. Either way, the riffs are nothing short of titanic, and the oppressive world of the sweaty gym with its testosterone-pumped hulks is effectively conveyed.

It’s not the only moment on the album that seems to touch on masculinity in the modern world. Isaac Is Typing… is about Holman’s OCD but, as all male mental health struggles must be these days, the vulnerability is hidden under many layers of self-defense. The guitars almost drown out Holman’s confessions, and his screamed vocals make it easy to overlook the vulnerability that comes with admitting to going to therapy, or lines like “my brain is a battlefield, I’m struggling to hold.” It’s an honest, telling indication of how it feels to struggle with the supposedly fluffy, emasculating problem of ‘mental health’ as a man today. Give us some boyish heavy rock music and a heavy layer of vocal distortion and maybe, just maybe, we might be able to admit our vulnerabilities amidst the blanket of noise.

If it’s starting to sound like HEAVY JELLY is a cerebral commentary on modern society, it’s not. Isaac Is Typing… is swiftly followed by the up-tempo party starter Bin Juice Disaster, which is simply about the habit of pushing down rubbish into the bin instead of taking it out, albeit with its own connotations of self-destruction and neglect. There’s more obvious fun in John Wick (chorus: “I’m John Wick, bitch”) and the rapid, post-therapy rant The Mushroom and the Swan, which sports a relentless drum groove destined to ignite dozens of mosh pits when the duo goes on tour in October.

By far the boldest risk of the album comes with the closing track, Everything and Nothing, which starts, jarringly, with a mandolin, and later features a violin solo. Here, at last, Holman’s lyrics are given space to become their most heartfelt. “I see your smile in other people’s faces / Memories and traces / I wish you could’ve stayed,” Holman sings heartbreakingly. It’s not the catchiest song on the album, but it’s easily the most lyrically devastating, and a shockingly brave closer after such a loud and rowdy album. Aggression is easy, comfortable even, and SOFT PLAY are very good at writing aggressive music, but to close their album with a song about raw grief, with no gritty riffs or self-deprecating jokes to hide behind, takes real guts. “Setting sun and a starling murmuration / Amongst the devastation / I feel love,” Holman concludes beautifully at the end of this supposedly angry punk album. It makes you wonder: perhaps it really was about love all along.

Shannon & the Clams: The Moon Is In The Wrong Place review – wildly entertaining dive into the abyss
21
Jun

Raucous 60s rockabilly might sound like an unlikely match for an album unequivocally about grief, but Shannon & the Clams pull it off miraculously in this deeply personal record, which shifts from joy to despair – and often a complex mix of the two – with astonishing ease.

To the casual listener, the seventh album from Californian indie stalwarts Shannon and the Clams is a riot. The Moon Is In The Wrong Place is an endearingly fuzzy trip back to the wilder side of 60s pop: there’s sashaying doo-wop grooves, gloriously melodramatic vocals, a dollop of rockabilly barnstormers. Take the opening track, for instance, which ends theatrically with a flamenco-style coda over a long held note in the vocals, landing with an almighty stomp that’s only lacking a few castanets to bring the point home. It’s a sign of the up-tempo joys to come: The Moon Is In The Wrong Place is an album plenty interesting enough to entertain even before the lyrics can be fully understood.

It’s only by the closing song, Life Is Unfair, that the tight subject matter of The Moon becomes impossible to ignore. “How do you expect me to understand that the love of my life was taken away from me?” Shannon Shaw asks, an opening lyric so stark that even the chugging drums and cheery strummed guitar can’t hide its pain. It turns out The Moon Is In The Wrong Place is an album squarely about grief. The whole project is a result of Shaw’s personal tragedy, namely when Shaw’s fiancé died in a car accident just weeks before their wedding.

It doesn’t take much digging to find the emotional devastation left behind by that fateful day throughout this record. The Vow shuffles its way through an image of the wedding that never was, Shaw begging for the vows she’ll never hear. “First time in my life things fall into place,” she laments. It should sound dour and heavy, but the miracle of this album is Shaw’s knack of finding the light in the darkest of times. “It seems like it’s over, but forever you’re mine,” she concludes optimistically in that same song, letting all sorrow be forgotten with that raucous flamenco finale. It’s not just a satisfying surprise, but surely an act of Herculean bravery from Shaw, who seems willing to tease out whatever drops of hope she can find in such serious and personal subject matter.

Indeed, The Vow is just a taste of the twin themes of delight and misery weaving through Wrong Place. Big Wheel, for instance, is an electrifying piece of garage rock that I’m certain would have achieved world domination – probably alongside a wheel-themed dance move – had it been released sixty years ago. The chorus in particular, with its hulking bass riff and belted vocals, is an impulsive finger-snapper. Bean Fields provides the album’s sunniest moment, graced with almost irritatingly merry plonked piano and lyrics about a wild romance in the fields “where the bugs sing” – the fact that one of the lovers in question is no longer living is only the subtlest of dark undertones, easily lost in the uninhibited slide guitar solo and atmospheric hum of cicadas.

That’s not to say Wrong Place attempts to ignore the darker sides of grief. Oh So Close, Yet So Far is a deeply poignant doo-wop number that sets out Shaw’s conciliatory vision of her finance not being completely lost, but instead poetically subsumed into nature. “No I can’t touch you / Cause you are every star at night,” she rasps, reaching for a part of her lover – his soul, or perhaps literally his atoms – that will exist for eternity. She’s less certain on Real of Magic, a deceptively simple ballad about hallucination, complete with haunting call-and-response backing vocals that seems to mirror the conflicting voices in Shaw’s head.

The album’s title track and central triumph follows, a grippingly distorted descent into genuine terror. Guitars mimic an ‘SOS’ morse code call as Shaw jabs out a closely harmonised one-note melody to the words “The sun burned down when you left this world / Now there is some imposter in the sky”, surely about as epic as opening lyrics get. A furious pair of congas propel the ensuing torrent, evoking the deep-seated sense of cosmic ‘wrongness’ that comes with suddenly losing someone you had assumed would be around for your whole life. It’s the most exciting, darkly compelling piece of indie rock you’re likely to hear all year.

Perhaps inevitably, the less attention-grabbing corners of the album feel superfluous by comparison. The sharply focussed subject matter is briefly lost in the portion of the record where Cody Blanchard takes over vocals, and UFO’s psychedelic account of alien abduction feels slightly clichéd and melodically takes perhaps a little bit too much inspiration from House of the Rising Sun. Blanchard’s best contribution comes with In the Grass, a gentle acoustic guitar number which finds a pretty melody to match his country rasp.

Wrong Place is, undoubtedly, Shannon Shaw’s record, and it’s she who neatly wraps up proceedings with Life Is Unfair. It’s a short track that epitomises the album’s remarkable strength – the delicate balancing act between sorrow and optimism. The final words come in the form of a typically bouncy singalong hook in the major key which masks deep layers of a sadness that only feels partly quashed. “Life is unfair yet beautiful,” Shaw concludes, “only because you were here.”

Charli xcx: BRAT review – queen of the club reveals her softer side
18
Jun

BRAT may offer some of the nastiest club floor-fillers of Charli xcx’s lauded career, but there’s also vulnerable reflections on loss and the daunting prospect of becoming a mother. The result is a rollercoaster of an album that makes a point of its dramatic shifts in tone.

Charli xcx is an artist most at home in the frenetic, sweaty confines of a busy London nightclub, her music bursting with punchy drum machines and oddball electronic samples that no doubt come into their own when accompanied by strobes and a packed crowd of revelers. She’s gained so much notoriety as a dance music-adjacent singer that her 2022 album, CRASH, had some critics lamenting that she’d finally succumbed to the alluring pull of Top 40 pop (actual guitars! verses and choruses!). In reality, that album’s stellar highlights – zinging 80s throwback Lightning, honeyed funk hit Yuck – hinted at a songwriting knack that Charli would always have up her sleeve, no matter the genre.

Alas, as BRAT emphatically proves, Charli xcx’s ability to produce some our time’s finest nightclub anthems remains alive and well. As if to prove a point, she puts a song called Club classics at track two, a pulsating, shapeshifting electronic track that sounds all the more dynamic after the curiously static and unexciting opener 360. “I wanna be blinded by the lights” and “I’m gonna dance all night,” come the chanted lyrics. They’re the sort of words we’ve heard in endless dance and disco songs ever since the genre’s genesis, but Charli knows there’s hidden depths behind that urge to blind and deafen ourselves on a night out. Why do we not only want to dance, but need it? What are we escaping from?

She spends the rest of the album offering her own, very personal answer to that question. BRAT turns out to be a strikingly intimate listen. She confesses she wants to “go back in time to when I wasn’t insecure,” on Rewind, a track which uses a fuzzy mix to acutely convey Charli’s gnawing anxiety, plus some clever tape rewind samples. “I don’t know if I belong here anymore,” comes the final line of I might say something stupid, a quiet confessional amidst the chaos, in which Charli’s typical heavy autotune becomes a knowingly imperfect mask – a desperate attempt to hide her own frailties. I think about it all the time goes a step further, seeing Charli reflect on her friend becoming a mother and whether “a baby might be mine.” It’s such a vulnerable, thoughtful set of lyrics that the music ends up feeling like an afterthought. Perhaps the same is true for So I, a touching ode to late fellow artist Sophie with a pretty chorus but a long buildup that promises a payoff which never quite arrives.

And yet, there are just as many examples of Charli portraying herself as an unassailable queen of the dancefloor, with no insecurities to unpick. Lead single and BRAT‘s central banger, Von dutch, is an infectious take down of all Charli’s jealous contemporaries. “It’s so obvious I’m your number one,” she boasts as siren-like synths wail and a snare drum – mixed loud and in-your-face – smashes through the mix. Mean girls reads as a modern, lightly tongue-in-cheek feminist anthem, and sports a wild piano breakdown which Charli skillfully works into one of this album’s most irresistible beat drops. The biggest flex of Charli’s producer muscles, however, comes with B2b, an oppressively heavy masterclass in infectious synth loops and expertly crafted hooks.

The result is a two-sided album that switches from intimate confessions to festival-ready anthems, sometimes chaotically – the tender orchestral intro of Everything is romantic sounds odd immediately after the boisterous Von dutch. Only a few songs – Sympathy is a knife, Rewind – attempt to marry Charli’s chagrin to singalong party choruses, and as a result listening to BRAT can feeling about listening to two albums at once, switching from one to the other at random intervals.

On the other hand, BRAT‘s huge emotional range makes for a dance album that unusually probes for some sensitivity behind the hedonism. The latter emotion seems to win out in the end. Closing number 365 is a reprise of the opening track, although this time with a full-throttle dance drop and deafeningly scratchy synth hook. It’s gloriously odd moments of pop excess like these that are ultimately BRAT‘s biggest strengths, but this album also succeeds in showing us the hidden depths lurking amidst all the stage smoke and flashing lights of the club.

Home Counties: Exactly As It Seems review – a masterpiece in diverse post-punk
4
Jun

After the addition of a new member, upgrading Home Counties from a 5-piece to a 6-piece, the band has truly found their sound and developed it perfectly to cover and tackle many problems in a war against the mundane. Matthew Rowe explains all.

Formerly Buckinghamshire-based band Home Counties have been on the scene for a while, but have unfortunately stayed under my radar until recently. Whilst I was shuffling on Spotify, I was lucky enough to hear one of their earlier songs, Back to the 70s, which instantly struck me. In their earlier days, they adopted a much more post-punk central sound while attempting to maintain upbeat instrumental tracks to accompany them. This was a nice change to the genre’s status quo, especially as it appeases my love for funk and post-punk, forming the new genre of post-funk.

Before making their debut album, Home Counties picked up pianist and
second vocalist Lois Kelly, who I believe was the key to fully fleshing out their songs. The combination of Kelly, as well as already established
vocalist Will Harrison, is executed to perfection, with both voices able
to deliver loud, cutting lines as well as much more melodic background vocals
that work in harmony with one another. The introduction of Kelly also changed
the band’s sound, tackling their funky, disco-inspired instrumentals head-on.
This leads to a set of much stronger-sounding tracks and keeps a consistent
theme that varies just enough to avoid too many repetitive singles.

Picking up a second vocalist was the best thing Home Counties could have done

Home Counties have managed to stay completely balanced on a scale from having either the instrumentals or the vocals drowning out the other, both in their mixing but also in the musical intricacy and the importance of the lyrics. One great example of this is Cradle, Coffin, which boasts a very punchy 4/4 beat, but the band alongside both Harrison’s and Kelly’s lyrics work perfectly, allowing enough focus to lay off the beat while they get their point across to us. This balance allows for a particularly enjoyable listening experience. I have found that it’s great background music if you are working, but also a great album to sit down and listen to in its entirety.

A lot of hard-hitting and relatable themes are explored in this project.
This was inspired by the band moving to the big city of London from their
previously calm, out-of-city lives, which is a big change for anyone. The first
single from this album to be released was Bethnal Green, a song tackling the topic of gentrification and how it can lead to the feeling of not belonging to where you came from. “Just say you don’t contest me, just say you won’t forget me” is a particularly poignant example of the two. Another song, You Break It, You Bought It directly attacks the general public’s, and specifically my least favourite kind of collector, landlords (M3 Lettings and Fit Property; if you are reading this, I do not like you). This track nails it when it comes to the state of renting as well as providing a brilliant, funky instrumental including my favourite bassline on the project from Bill Griffin. The vocals provide both an insight as to how predatory these companies are as well as their rather personal thoughts, “Lynching landlords in my dreams” being rather extreme, but getting the point across.

In some of their songs, they have also adapted a newer, more electronic style of music, my favourite example being the title track, Exactly As It Seems. This kicks off with an instrumental that is akin to the intro music to ITV’s The Job Lot. This results in an 8-bit-sounding backing track, which you wouldn’t think would work, yet it does almost seamlessly with the dynamic duo of vocalists I have grown to love over this album. This is also apparent in Funk U Up, which boasts a very impressive electronic keyboard track straight out of a futuristic soundscape to accompany a song about constantly falling behind and messing up.

One thing Home Counties does to a very high standard is build songs up to a huge crescendo, often releasing the anger built up throughout the song in a blaze of funk glory. This is done best in Wild Guess, which is the single that made me most excited for the album. This starts nice and slowly but builds up from stripped-back instrumentals, setting a calm tone for most of the song while solemnly putting across a message about the cost of living crisis before hitting the final chorus, which elevates the instrumental into a catchy, ride cymbal driven melody composed of all the previous parts.

As well as developing their general sound, they have done an incredible job of developing their structuring and variety

Their final track in this album puts together all of these factors of individual greatness in previous tracks into one brilliant finale, Posthumous Spreadsheets. It starts off with a very Beatles-esque Come Together inspired drum track and much like Wild Guess, continues on relatively calmly at the beginning, demonstrating their ability to deliver strong monologues above an electronic beat, before kicking in halfway through. This song wraps up the themes covered elegantly, with the final song being about how awful the pressures and stress of a modern office is through a combination of satire and much more serious lyrics about how difficult it is to enjoy yourself whilst working at the bottom.

To summarise this project, I was blown away both during the release of the singles and the grand release of the album. They have blended two of my favourite genres perfectly and have given me a new view of what post-punk truly means. Home Counties are a very underrated band, and I hope they gain more traction soon, so if you’re reading this, please go and listen to them.