Album Review // Good Shoes - No Hope, No Future

When you’ve been away for three years, the pressure is on for you to grab the notorious second album by the proverbial horns and drag it into a world where you’ve matured, the fans from your debut still burst with adoration and hordes of new listeners become hooked. But it can be bloody hard, which is demonstrated by a catalogue of one hit wonders throughout musical history and unfortunately Good Shoes’ follow up is no exception. In a contrived attempt to feign that they’ve gone and ‘done a Maccabees’, the second album has been stripped of the staple prepubescent charm that once made this London four-piece so endearing, leaving the ten new tracks drip rather bleakly with disenchantment. The pheromone-rich ‘Under Control’ leans towards the boy-ish charisma of pastures once visited and nostalgic ‘Do you Remember?’ smacks of their previous tales of Landan Town. But whilst rich with sporadic guitar riffs and snippets of familiarity, the rest of the album is smothered by a melancholy miserablism that hovers like a rather disappointing shadow.

Album Review // Chew Lips - Unicorn

Chew Lips debut album is a record of erotically charged pop that grabs you by the hips and pulsates against you until every part of your body longs to dance, with ‘Slick’ a clear standout track exuding as much effortless sexuality as a lover tracing their fingers on the inside of your arm. The album dispels the lazy musical comparisons to Karen O as whilst lead singer, Tigs, is brimming with exuberance when she’s hurling herself around stage, her musical style a lot more tame. Partly in that there’s an innocent inexperience to Tigs that Karen O’s inclination for deep-throating unsuspecting microphones wholeheartedly stamps out. It’s refreshing to see Chew Lips aren’t trying to be ‘the next [insert full-of-its-own-importance band name here]’, but by ‘Seven’ the album seems to peak, evoking the feeling of a break-dancer who’s used already thrown out their best head spinning moves and is only half way through a dance-off, especially by ‘Piano Song’ a ballad that feels like it’s trespassing in the form of a monologue from the seventies. A debut seemingly brimming with potential but falling at the last hurdle like an over-confident horse in the last ten seconds of a race.