RAZORLIGHT
Up All Night
Mercury Records
· Producer Steve Lillywhite (U2, The Pogues, The La’s) relinquishes his record-label desk job to contribute to band’s debut.
Razorlight are a young English-Swedish four-piece enjoying a groundswell of interest generated by furious gigging, as well as airplay on influential London indie radio station XFM. Funny then, that the band resemble the apocryphal Second World War soldier stranded on a desert island, unaware that the war is over. In this case, the soldier has the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, Television’s Marquee Moon and David Bowie’s Hunky Dory for company. When the poor grunt was demobbed into society, he was given a copy of Is This It? by the Strokes to find his way in the world.
Razorlight are derivative, but the same could be said of all the aforementioned bands, even VU – the question is what to do with these influences? Use them to mythologize your roots: "Don’t Go Back to Dalston," advises against a visit to a village near Carlisle by escalating it to the scale of Johnny & June/Nancy & Lee’s "Jackson." Vocalist-songwriter Johnny Borrell distinguishes himself from Julian Casablancas’s other disciples by eschewing the cool school of vocals – impassioned is a starting point. On album highlight "In the City" (no fear of plagiarism here), they temporarily transform into the Patti Smith Group. With their homework done, Razorlight should make the difficult second album that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
|
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.