This album has been around for a while now, and I have managed to avoid it so far as I felt that the hype surrounding it was just so over the top that it was unlikely to ever live up to it. My mind was changed by a friend recommending it as his album of the year, and as I always take personal testimony over journalistic hyperbole I gave it a shot. First impressions did tend to reinforce my original opinion that while it was OK, I have heard better albums this year, but on further hearings some of the songs did start to stand out. The biggest surprise for me was realising that ‘Dominos’, which I had heard featured on TV and radio ads recently, was by The Big Pink, and so that was a good start. In case you have missed the hype, it centres around the fact that Milo Cordell’s dad Denny was an Island Records exec in the 60’s and 70’s, and Robbie Furze once played with Alec Empire, and has been ‘linked’ to Lily Allen. Add in the fact that they named themselves after The Band’s seminal album ‘Music From Big Pink’ and the impression that you are left with is of a couple of chancers who reckon that the biz owes them a living. So, on to the record. Musically, ‘Crystal Visions’ owes much to late 80’s Creation bands in the way that they drench the song in an overload of guitars, and the second half just screams Jesus And Mary Chain. ‘Too Young To Love’ was their first single, here re-recorded and remastered, and if this had been the first thing that I had heard from the band then I would have been quite impressed. ‘Dominos’ is up next, and needs no introduction. Like me, you must have heard it even if, like me, you didn’t know who it was by, and it is still my favourite track from the band. ‘Love In Vain’ reins in the noisy guitars for as close to a ballad as the band manage, but it sounds rather weak after those first three tracks. ‘At War With The Sun’ tries to redress that balance by bringing back the swathes of noise, but it sounds too disjointed to really work – like it is three or four snippets of songs welded together. They manage to pull things back with ‘Velvet’, another of their early singles, and what is generally agreed to be the best thing that they have done. Although the ghost of JAMC still hangs heavy over the music, the band put in a spirited performance, and this uplifting song becomes one of the highlights of the album. ‘Golden Pendulum’ (fairly average ballad) and ‘Frisk’ (odd, experimental drone) bridge the gap until the title track emerges as a Phil Spector-ish duet between Furze and backing singer Jo Apps. The sparse production gives the song a huge, echoey feel, adding an extra, haunting quality to this ballad, which when combined with the soaring keyboard motif imbues the whole song with an ethereal quality. ‘Tonight’ can only be a comedown after that, and its simplistic tune and terrace-anthem chorus mark it down as just more filler, but ‘Count Backwards From Ten’ actually features some real guitar riffs and a vocal that can be heard over the music, so picking their most overtly indie-guitar track to end that album was a good choice. On the whole this is a pretty good album – perhaps just a little too much filler in there to make it a classic – but much better than I had feared from the hype while not quite the album of the year that my mate insisted that it was. Definitely one to divide opinions, but one that you need to hear to make up your own mind.
