This Weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to… S.C.U.M. – Again into Eyes…

I’m pretty crook right now hence no posts since Monday from myself and not sure when I’ll be back, many thanks to those who took up the slack during the week, but here’s one I baked earlier…wbs

So much to hate here… pretentiously flamboyant singer, excessive youth, flamboyant singer going out with a Geldof [Peaches seeing as you asked], excessive reverence of the 1980s, link to The Horrors, did I mention the flamboyant singer? Then to top it all there’s the far too knowing and referential name. Throw in the fact they’ve recently recorded a series of tracks entitled Warsaw, Berlin, Paris and…er… Athens and I think we know precisely what part of the musical map they’re coming from. And yet, and yet…

Despite all that, there’s something here I also really like here.

Formed about three years ago they transitioned from an slightly Joy Division/industrial inflected art rock outfit [for an example of which listen to the motorik influenced ‘Second Sea’ below] to something positioned much closer to a shoe-gaze styled take on Simple Minds or Psychedelic Furs style slightly skew wise big production pop from the mid 1980s. And if that sounds like a convergence with the Horrors, particularly on their almost peerless Skying album from earlier this year, well so it is. Irritating lead singer Thomas Cohen has a vocal style that is oddly similar to that of Violent Femmes front man Gordon Gano. Another member, Samuel Kilcoyne is the offspring of one of Add N to X – so he’d want to have good keyboards. One real strength is the rhythm section, bass and drums are excellent.

They still do art-rock stuff. Sub-torch song, sub-‘ballad’, ‘Paris’ [apparently based on Dada artists – spare us], is a particularly lamentable example, but it’s one misstep on an album with a a series of songs that revolve around familiar but somehow skillfully reworked chord progressions set in suitably chilly keyboard lines and washes.

They sensibly, or so we are told, eschew guitars while still managing to sneak treated guitar sounds into the mix [None more Echo and the Bunnymen single ‘Amber Hands’ opens to a barrage of them]. Actually that mention of the Bunnymen is telling. There are hints of post-punk shading into goth [‘Cast Into Seasons’ is a good example which has something of first album New Order about it] but one can only hope that they can avoid the glum cul-de-sac that that leads to, if that is they make it to the second album. One also hopes that Cohen can discard the appalling Bonoisms of their ‘Whitechapel’ video.

But when they get it right, as with ‘Summon the Sound’s’ rushing drums and propulsive baseline set against phased walls of sound it works just fine.

And so, while there’s a shallowness of sound and approach – there’s perhaps one song too many on the album that suggests that they love the sounds over the melody – particularly when set against the aforementioned Horrors album, then that seems oddly appropriate for a band who take the Furs in their most pop incarnation as a jumping off place. In that context isn’t shallow precisely the point?

Amber Hands

Faith Unfolds

Summon the Sound

Whitechapel

Second Sea [from earlier in their career]

Berlin [from more recent sessions]