Album opener
Lea Room has been playing for about thirty seconds and has already drawn me right in. It’s a nice little fuzzy indie guitar romp which probably manages to fit in nearly every indie rock convention going and still sound reasonably fresh.
Some of the new tracks do make me wonder if they could be handed the label British Tokyo Police Club (if Tokyo Police Club ever become big enough to have regional variants that is) and others leave me fondly reminiscent of Urusei Yatsura.
Cranes and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes is pure Yatsura-inspired brilliance catchy and anarchic and probably the highlight of the album. From here the album really takes off with manic
The End and Everything After where the dual vocals fight for supremacy to delightfully schizophrenic effect before morphing into some kind of indie-pop monster intent on subjugating your ears.
The only real criticism I have, if you can call it that, is that the album puts previous releases to shame. Which is no bad thing really, but there is a huge jump in production which makes earlier tracks like
Our Bipolar Friends stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Anyway I like this, much in the same way I’ve liked most of their stuff so far. It’s a fairly polished and accomplished album that captures a band rising in confidence and hopefully set for great things.
Waited Up ’Til It Was Light is released on 2nd June 2008.
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