What are bands for? When a few like minded friends get together and start jamming, jumpers for pre-amps, in a school music room or dilapidated scout hut, why are they doing it? Because it's cool? Because girls like boys in bands? Because it's a legitimate excuse to hang out in a gang, with the heightened boldness and exhilaration that comes with that? Because the people involved have something to say?
Ah well, it's never that last one is it? Helmsley five-piece "One Night Only" (and that's a happening name by the way, lads!) are an almost perfect post Oasis/ Libertines "indie" band: all stripey t-shirts, tousled hair and grainy black and white photos. The sleeve photo of them in a post-gig hotel-room, bottles and sunglasses and cigarettes strewn around the room, while the band, shirtless and sweaty, crowd around an apple lap-top, maybe be the single most perfect document of everything that's
wrong with the modern world. They look simultaneously bored, nervous and vapid - everything you don't want from a band.
And another thing you don't want from a band is this odd, soupy music.
I had to check which year this record was made - it sounds so 1990s. It sounds in fact like Mansun. But a Mansun bereft of Paul Draper's oddness and intelligence. The lyrics here are amongst the most banal I've ever heard. "All I want" gives us the numbskull sing-along "speak how you feel, so the words sound real". The whole of "Nothing Left" is a credulous list of rhetorical farts of the calibre of "she's gone to work and left a note on the door, just goodbye it couldnt say more". Clearly a lot of money has been invested in this album. Surely somewhere along the way someone should have said to singer George " Listen mate, I know you're no
Noel Gallagher but pull your finger out: this is rubbish." The chorus of "Feeling Fine", and it's another inspired title, is "Time is a healer". I mean - for fucks sake.
The music is big, upbeat, with those "duh, duh, duh" bass-lines so beloved of 80s stadium bands. The vocals are reverby and sink into the mix like a collapsed souffle. Only Jack "Fish" Sails keyboard (oh they ALL have nick-names) catapults the band into something out of the ordinary. The Depeche Mode synth break on "You got it all wrong" is deftly done and adds some colour to the slate greys of Ed Buller's production and his nifty house keys on "Feeling Fine" put it in the region of zippy pop.
He's carrying this lot like pop's hod carrier. What a bunch of bricks.
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