Seizing opportunities presented by the digital space, Codeine Velvet Club‘s album will be released in an innovative manner.

Starting from November 16^th free online music service we7 (www.we7.com) will be streaming two tracks a week from the bands’ eponymously titled debut album, ultimately streaming the full album before it is realeased on general sale.  In addition, we7 will have exclusive access to the band, publishing interviews with Jon Lawler, lead singer and chief songwriter of The Fratellis, on its website at the opening and close of Codeine Velvet Club’s UK tour.

For fans who listen to the tracks at we7 or via a distributed we7 widget and want to experience the band live, we7 will also be running a series of nationwide and regional ticket giveaways, helping fans to get as close to the band and the music as possible.

On December 7th Spotify subscribers can hear the album via its premium service aswell as an additional three exclusive live tracks.  Non paying Spotify users (on the ad-funded site) will be able to hear a sampler of six tracks from the album from the same date.

The physical and complete digital Codeine Velvet Club album will be made fully available across all platforms on December 28^th along with their next single “Hollywood”.

Says Island GM Jon Turner: “At Island we are keen to embrace innovative ways to deliver our artists’ music to the consumer.   The Codeine Velvet Club album is such a strong and unique body of work that we felt it was vital for fans to hear as much music as possible upfront of release to create what we are confident will be a huge word of mouth viral uptake. We wanted to partner with Spotify and we7 who both have a passionate audience of music lovers and are the perfect digital platforms to spread the word”

Codeine Velvet Club is a new musical collaboration featuring Jon Lawler – lead singer and chief songwriter of The Fratellis – and singer-songwriter Lou Hickey, that celebrates their shared love of ’60s girl-boy duets, dramatic orchestral pop, and dark post-war Hollywood and Las Vegas romanticism.

Record Label: Island Records

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Our Rating:

Codeine Velvet Club have got me calling call Hollywood ‘Tinseltown’, name checking Old Blue Eyes and telling strangers in bars that, back in the day, you never had to worry about a dead hooker in the pool so long as you knew the right people. A side project of Fratellis’ front man Jon Lawler and singer-songwriter Lou Hickey, CVC make a spirited attempt to annex the swath of retro musical territory stretching from noir to Nancy Sinatra. The band’s opening thrust – their panzer strike through the Ardennes, if you will – gets things off to a cracking start. This reviewer’s favourite track, ‘Hollywood’, is a punchy number oozing silver screen delight and film noir charm that serves as a sort of manifesto for the rest of the homage-heavy album. Hard on its heels comes the probably-just-as-good-now-I-come-to-think-of-it ‘Vanity Kills’, a Broadway-style show tune that ups the swing and smooch factor with lines like “Life’s a roll of the dice/But you’ll pay the price/When that curtain falls”.

Seriously, serve up these songs on Radio One for long enough and fedora sales would skyrocket. But don’t all rush off to buy shares in Acme Hats Inc. quite yet, because the snag with CVC is that they’re essentially a novelty act – and novelty can get old real fast. ‘Reste Avec Moi’ could be a Kinks’ soundtrack for a hip French film, ‘Like A Full Moon’ is a song that The Coral never quite got round to writing, while ‘Nevada’, orchestrated by Belle & Sebastian’s Mick Cooke, has a woozy romantic beauty. However, this whistle-stop genre tour means that the album never quite breaks free from pastiche. It’s difficult to dislike Lawler and Hickey’s rummage through the musical equivalent of a dressing-up box, but ‘Codeine Velvet Club’ sounds like a parlour game in a way that Amanda Palmer’s Weimar burlesque and Luke Haines’ acidic 1930s anti-nostalgia somehow manage to avoid. I bet CVC had fun making this album and I certainly enjoyed listening to it, but in the end ‘Codeine Velvet Club’ is like Gus Van Sant’s remake of ‘Psycho’ – glossy, well-produced and kinda pointless.