A clever, satirically witty, catchily entertaining mish-mash of styles from pop to country by the Cambridge-formed London band in this third LP, heralding a change of label and a nod to reaching the end of their twenties, an a sense of wondering what the future holds. Opener I’m In Love (Subaru) leaps into a lush, almost saccharine 80s saxophone-drenched love-song pop, a nod almost to middle age with reference to “king of the road”. The title track is a catchy, pub piano pop-rock style barbed attack on older, toxic masculinity taking on a narrator’s voice echoing the Four Yorkshiremen from the Monty Python sketch: “… these kids don't even know they've been born … Boys these days / Look like girls, look like girls / Maybe what they need is a war / Ah, these kids, nah, they don't care about nothing at all / When I was your age, we didn't even have doors, we just had / Playing in the traffic with rocks / If a car knocked you down, well then, you'd get right back up.” Moving Together plays with the act of settling down, and opens and repeats a distorted echo of the Coronation Street TV soap theme. Condensation is a punchy indie pop. Sensible is a fabulous satirical leaps mischievously into memories of heady partying days: “Take me to London / Take me to Task / Take me to Dalston / We'll play Fred Again.. and dance / And let's fuck remotely in those self repeating flats/ You know Chablis was incredible, the Chablis was incredible …” Bang Bang Bang parodies a western whistling country-style soundtrack and more pointedly, the casual attitudes to gun culture in the US: “He don’t get hard unless he takes a gun to bed”), given an extra ironic edge by the fact that the band were robbed at gunpoint in San Francisco when stopping their van for coffee break last December, within minutes of their tour. Head to Space sounds like something from the Come on Eileen violin-era hoedown peak of early 80s Dexys Midnight Runners. Other highlights include Planned Obsolescence, and the the closer, Maybe When We’re 30, which addresses the excitement of settling down: “Maybe when we're thirty, baby, we can get a dog /And once a year, we'll go out and we'll watch the War On Drugs.” A pastiche of fun pop and rock from a very talented band. Out on Bright Antenna / Distiller Music.
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