The Long Blondes
Someone To Drive You Home

THE REVIEW

Matter of style: between glamour and intellectualism made of quotes and stuffy dissipation, moving through retro interiors where mid-century modern decor serves to cover the cracks on damp walls, while an old VHS of a '40s noir plays on TV and an aseptic row of beige houses can be glimpsed through the window. Matter of style for a five-member band (three girls, two guys) to call themselves The Long Blondes without any of the five being blonde. And above all, it's a matter of style for her, the leader, Kate Jackson, meticulously dressed as a '60s thirty-something in heels with blouse and neckerchief, sexy, experienced, cynical, and tremendously attention-grabbing (and talented). This alone is enough to understand that after the Arctic Monkeys, who could be easily mistaken in the middle of a semi-pimply and annoying class from a vocational school on a trip to London, the new English "next big thing" is the return to unmistakably British fashion-driven and vintage pop-rock, diametrically opposed to those raw arctic monkeys.

They come from Sheffield, like Pulp; they're produced by ex-Pulp Steve Mackey, even though they would have preferred Jarvis Cocker; they love (no kidding?) Pulp. They're very keen on the artwork of their records, all curated by Kate. They care a lot about non-trivial songwriting (thanks to Dorian Cox, guitarist), which winks at the educated thirty-something thanks to literary and cinematic references, without giving up on prosaic immersions in a grayed and smoky everyday life, with some scattered and clever adolescent references and many more middle-aged runaway reflections: and with this, they bring together Pulp, Black Box Recorder, Saint Etienne, Pet Shop Boys, Smiths.

Their full-length debut, which collects some previously released EP songs (and here adapted) and many new pieces, sounds like Pulp’s His'n'hers devoid of keyboards and declined in a more disco-rock interpretation, passing through Blondie and taking some cues from the more recent La Tigre and Raveonettes. The result is that indie-dance which Pulp tried to ride in the early nineties (see "Live On", only recently released) and which here seems to be reborn, well-updated and corrected, with cues taken from what came before and what came after.
They are straightforward songs, uncomplicated, making you tap your foot on the first listen and already lodged in your head by the second. The great care for melodies, well-thought-out and crafted choruses, scratchy guitar riffs between dub and neo-romantic nuances, and Kate's voice, eclectic and theatrical, wonderfully capable of interpreting the narrative perspective of the lyrics from always different and oblique angles, are the ingredients of the album. It ranges from the mature sound and fullness of "Weekend Without Makeup" to the more noir movements of "A Knife For The Girls", passing through more vibrant pieces like "Lust In The Movies" and "Only Lovers Left Alive", to the more straightforwardly pop ends of the record, namely "Once And Never Again" and "Swallow Tattoo", short, catchy, and danceable sixties-style tweepop gems. "Giddy Stratospheres", with a formidable blend of words and music, with a foundation given by prominent bass, claps, and a sharp guitar, stands out: it reeks of sweat in an eighties club, rolls between well-furnished attics and dark underbellies, and in the living room, halfway, it really sounds great. There's also time for interpretations that, thanks also to Kate's voice, kidnap Garbage and take them to visit the Smiths ("In The Company Of Women"), for almost melodramatic lightness ("Heaven Help The New Girl") and for faster outbursts ("Separated By Motorways"), but always pop to the core.

The settings are provincial, creating slightly lazy atmospheres, marred by routine, between a Hopper painting and the streets of Saturday nights or a mid-week morning. Apartments above pet shops, supermarkets, pubs where glances are exchanged through smoke and the frosted glass of a pint, bourgeois houses where loneliness and exhausting rituals are unraveled form the backdrop for stories of couples, difficult relationships, bored girls. They reference films and at times seem to project them, these five blond-non-blondes, so that each track corresponds to a mood, a film, a different sensitivity; all while maintaining a solid underlying homogeneity.

Having said all this, with the usual words squandered, I will be straightforward and cautiously (but not too much) doubtful: in extremis, one of the albums of the year (?).