Wednesday, December 13, 2006

#4 The Long Blondes - Someone To Drive You Home

I never liked Franz Ferdinand much: I never bothered to listen to Maximo Park, and I never much cared for Belle and Sebastian, as I'm sure you know and are still shocked about. Shocking! On the other hand, I worship the ground McLusky and Blur walk on, so it's safe to say I have a somewhat love hate relationship towards British rock and roll music. Oh and I love Rachel Stevens.

I managed to hear Someone To Drive You Home a month or so ago, and it is fucking a brilliant album. Maybe Franz Ferdinand has put out stuff this good - I don't know and I don't care, the point is that I haven't heard a record like STDYH in a length of time measurable most easily in years. Long years. And yes I did just smash the name of the record into an unpronouncable acronym - it's that good.

And here's why. Imagine if Chrissy Hynde was British and didn't play guitar, but had other girls in a band with her that did, and also dudes, and those guys and girls were like, um former members of like, The Go-Gos, The Rapture, and Echo and Bunnymen, for example. Of course, such a lineup says nothing of the songwriting, and as strong as the performances are, the songwriting is better. Apparantly some people don't really listen to lyrics, and they complain maybe about having to actually sitting and listening to and thinking about music to develop an appreciation of words, but albums like this, that keep it terse, simple, to the point, witty, catchy and awesome prove those people to be the dumbasses they are.

Sure of course it's all been said before, and that's when the performaces come in. You get so much sense of personality through listening to these songs, it makes one wonder if maybe this, rather than the appearance, was why people fell in love with people like Debbie Harry. It's fair to say I'm in love with Kate Jackson (our fair band's lead singer), and it's fair to say that that's what she's after, and that's what she'll get. None of these songs are about just sex, though they are about sex, perhaps primarily, they're about petty personal relationships, being an dick who doesn't have anything more important to worry about than petter personal relationships and how everyone is a dick. Kate Jackson understands you. She's a dick to. It's like the girls who play video games thing.

The rest of the band is great. They play the rhythms and the notes, and they do some atmospherics, the backing vocals are extremely well done, but yeah, that's just the shit that will get people to not turn off the CD. As with pretty much every good album ever, it's in the arrangements, the songwriting, the amorphous and cop out sounding "feel", but unfortunately that's the best I can do right now.

Watch The Long Blondes sign a contract with Capitol/EMI and sell a million records next year. Watch it happen. There is no reason anyone between the ages of 17 and 26 who already listens to rock music on a regular basis would not eat this record alive - and on top of that it deserves whatever success it gets (peaked at #44 in the UK!). But c'mon, like the Brits ever knew what they wanted.

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