RhianEdwards is a freelance journalist and poet. Her first collection of poems Parade the Fib (published by tall-Lighthouse) was awarded the Poetry Book Society Choice for autumn 2008. Rhian is also a singer/songwriter for the ukulele and horror film buff. 
‘My Town’, the debut single and album amuse bouche from Brighton Trio Reverence, is something of an anti-triumph for indie rock. From the opening guitar riff to the thankfully accelerated conclusion, My Town is hopelessly amateur with all the imbalance of a live pub recording and instrumental expertise of a sixth form band. The melody is a humdrum dirge defined by the nasal strain and limited vocal range of lead guitarist/lead singer Bob Duffield’s oratory. And just when you thought it was safe to acquiesce to the possibility of him being in tune, in come the insipid harmonies of the backing vocalist and bassist Mark D.Evennett. The lyrics and rhymes are wincingly trite, teeming with ham-fisted humdingers such as “there’s been deals I’ve been making, hands I’ve been shaking…Roads I’ve been paving and lives I’ve been saving’ and the curdling crème de la crème “if this is hospitality in a broken-up reality”. ‘My Town’ is a blunt and dim stab at Razorlight, indie rock by numbers yet hookless and dismally tame. As a debut single, there is no risk of The Reverence exploding onto the scene, they will barely tiptoe through the back door.
‘O Maybe I’, the follow-up single to Chapel Club’s debut single ‘Surfacing’, is a perfect combination of 1980s pop noir and contemporary Brit pop polish. It blends the dirty bass sound of early Dépêche Mode, the distorted electric strumming of U2’s the Edge and the self-questioning, conversational narrative and vocal clarity of Morrissey. The lyrics are considered and the rhymes are thoughtfully drawn out of pararhymes and assonance, mercifully steering away from the more obvious pitfalls of slovenly songwriting. (Though one does feel lead vocalist Lewis Bowman is suppressing the vibrato at the end of his lines to avoid the more blatant comparisons with the daffodil-flinging, quiffed crooner). At a time when the industry is plumbing and exhuming some of the worst elements of eighties pop (that we spent the nineties and noughties apologising for), Chapel Club have done their homework and returned to the godfathers. This is unquestionably a band to gig-stalk and integrate into your daily sound stream. There is a sophistication and technical confidence to ‘O Maybe I‘ that can’t help but tempt even most cynical of critics to make big claims for this band.
Christina Courtin’s self-titled debut album honey-traps you from the opening wooden plinks of the marimba in ‘Green Jay’. This is Norah Jones meets Fiona Apple with all the vocal, cocoa-warmth of the former and all the lyrical, poetic whimsy of the latter. Freshly graduated from the Julliard School of Music where Courtin studied violin, this album is a perfect alchemy of her classical training and contemporary acoustic sound, compounding chamber music with pedal steel guitar, keyboards, dirty electric guitar, toy piano and jazz double bass. Every song on this album has been crafted with the delicate precision of someone who makes model Spanish galleons out of matchsticks. Some of the tracks are almost brittle in their simplicity and never budge beyond a traditional piano and Courtin’s wonderfully toasty, ethereal voice as in ‘Mulberries’. Other songs morph into orchestral, folk symphonies as in ‘Green Jay’, ‘Bunday’, ‘February’ and ‘Unzipped’, or shape-shift into raw rock ballads as in ‘Laconia’ or ebullient, country jazz numbers as in ‘One Man Down’ and the infectious single ‘Foreign Country’. At the same time, a discernibly Oriental sound finds a vein into a number of the songs, as in ‘Green Jay’, ‘Unzipped’, ‘Rainy’ and ‘February’. Contemporaneously mournful and joyful, this is an Indie cinema soundtrack in the making and possible successor to the Aimee Mann mantle. Either way, the album is a triumph, testified best by Courtin’s own lyric: “blue skies shining down on me and I shine right back”.
Christened after the poetic 2000AD comic strip and self-proclaimed as “modern gospel for the space-age generation”, Revere’s latest single ‘As The Radars Sleep’ remains doggedly faithful to this London band’s tin-branding. Radars (as it is affectionately abbreviated) initially presents itself as a piece of old skool electronica of plastic drum beats, tinkling keyboard ivories and prowling bass-line with Stephen Ellis’s New Romantic vocals coming at you like ghosts from the television in Poltergeist. But just when you thought you had stepped into the DeLorean DMC-12 and flicked the flux-capacitor to 1985, the song takes an unexpected u-turn and swells into an orchestral epic of Muse-like operatics and Arcade Fire instrumental grandiosity. This is where the real melodics kick in and the song stakes its claim as something more than a regurgitation of retro New Wave. Revere’s signature violin, piano, cello, glockenspiel and trumpet (sadly no harp on this occasion) each find a vein into the song, lending it a contemporary texture and transporting it to a melodramatic crescendo. The ambition of this band in its instrumental virtuosity and Ellis’s vocal limberness is nothing short of impressive, but somehow the explosive energy of the live performance fails to translate. Despite conflating two eras of music under one song and the orchestral histrionics, Radars somehow lacks the hook and the originality to sweep you up into the musical tornado Revere is desperately trying hard to conceive.
Until the Earth Begins To Part’, the debut album from Edinburgh’s seven-piece band Broken Records, is the auditory equivalent of tasting an almost perfect dish and spending the entire time agonising over what the missing ingredient is. It may be the omission of this essential unknown that reduces what should be an epic album into background listening. It is not surprising Broken Records are branded the Scottish Arcade Fire given the cacophonic cocktail of violins, cellos, accordions, trumpets, pianos and synthesisers that go into the album, rendering each song wildly different from the last. The string arrangements oscillate seamlessly between classical, Cossack folk, Celtic ceilidh and mean electric fiddling, often reminiscent of the Velvet Underground’s John Cale and the Levellers’ John Sevink bowing. James Sutherland’s soft rock vocals also have dilute echoes of Killers’ frontman Brandon Flowers and Devotchka’s Nick Ursata yet never quite pack the same emotive punch. The missing ingredient nags. Could it be the songs have the hooks and crescendos but lack the finish? Or is the band’s versatility such that it suffers from an identity crisis? Perhaps Sutherland’s voice simply lacks the charisma and colour to carry the ambitiousness of this band.
The dungeon, otherwise known as the Ginglik or its previous incarnation as Shepherds Bush public toilets, was last Tuesday teeming with oestrogen, tattoos and cocktail dresses for the first leg of the Lipstick & Guitar Tour featuring Nell Bryden, Lana, Gabby Young and Kat Flint.
Ronnie Scotts was a sardine tin of the bold and the beautiful with Polish barmen pulling hissy fits, a tattood Betty Paige lookey-likey doing a coquettish striptease and audience members swinging off the curtain rails. However, none of this managed to upstage the two ravishing sets delivered by the Anglo-Franco duo that is the Fancy Toys.
It seemed the whole of North London’s A-level revising population were out in full force like sailors on leave, for some Maundy Thursday, floorboard-trampolining at Camden’s Electric Ballroom in reverence to London band Go:Audio.
It isn’t difficult to see why Irish-American, Celtic punk band Flogging Molly have released the song ‘Float’ as their latest single or indeed named their latest album after it. The layering of instrumentation in the song is stunningly executed, from the initial marching strum of the acoustic guitar, to the injection of the concertina, to the blast of the fiddle to the rambunctious climax complete with bass, drums, banjo and bodhran. What starts off as a traditional folk song soon morphs into an atomic, colossal anthem. ‘Float’ is a eulogy to the much hackneyed Irish themes of drunkenness and world-weariness, which also form the bulk of much of Flogging Molly’s back catalogue. Dave King’s stab at poetry in the lyrics seems both self-conscious and self-satisfied without being entirely convincing and his overly emphatic Dublin accent in the song can at times sound forced. However, the melody is outright infectious and will stalk you long after you’ve heard it. What is more, the intense energy of this song and this band cannot be denied. ‘Float’ is toe-tapping stuff and there are more hooks in this song than you’ll find on a Dublin boat yard.
