Came out of London in 2003/2004, with debut single 22 Grand Job, followed up by debut album, and their finest work yet, Capture/Release in 2005. Their early demos and first album managing to sum up the life of disatisfied city boys in the early 21st century with the odd injection of Eastern Europen romance, jumping from tracks boasting the mundanity of applying for 22 Grand A Year bank jobs, to 'just drifting along with no focus or meaning' in the succinctly titled Work Work Work (Pub Club Sleep), and then schizophrenicly flitting to odes to German spy stories in Strasbourg.
This writer here first came across them in 2003, at the Metro club in London, supporting Bloc Party, where they rammed through nearly fifteen songs in twenty minutes, a trait they never lost right up until 2006, when this writer saw them yet again, in Exeter Lemon Grove, only this time they played for forty minutes, with about twenty five songs, just as urgent, just as foppish.
Their second album Ten New Messages was a slight dissapointment, but still included a number of gems, an early outing for the fantastic, but then little known, Laura Marling in Suspicious Eyes, a tale of post 7/7 tube paranoia, a new version of track The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect, previously a 20 minute epic recorded especially for a Dior fashion show, the Eastern Bloc indebted fury of Trouble, one of the tracks most similar to Capture/Release, and Leave The City And Come Home, the culmination of all the slurred disillusionment they'd been singing for the past two records.
And that was all we heard, for two whole years. Until now, as their new album 'Klang' is to be released on 23rd March through V2/Co-op, with a new single '1989' due out on the 16th, much to my excitement!
So in preperation for that, I recommend we spend some time listening to these highlights of their career so far.
Strasbourg
Retreat
We Danced Together
All Too Human
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