Vincent Vincent and the Villains - Gospel Bombs
This one is a hard one to put my finger on. Gospel Bombs, the latest release and debut album by Vincent Vincent and the Villains, takes snippets from a wide range of genres. Although I can see where they get their influences from, it's not easy to pin them down into one genre. Not that you really need to, I guess.
I heard I’m Alive quite a few months ago (another acquisition on a free CD attached to a certain magazine) and expecting the rest of the album to be as poppy and uplifting, so I thought I’d say “yup, send it my way, I’ll review it!” Now, I’m not saying I was disappointed to find that the each song on the album is entirely different from the next. If anything, it’s intriguing, and is the reason why it has been on repeat on my hand-held-music-machine for the last week since it arrived.
Gospel Bombs has elements of flamenco-type guitars and dance-hall style ska/reggae/rockabilly spattered within 50’s early rock’n’roll stylings. The album, as a whole, takes me back to a time of where dancehalls where the place to be. For example, Sweet Girlfriend is a cute little barbershop quartet-esque track about a guy and how grateful he’s not single. I imagine the girl he’s talking about to be wearing clothes similar to those of the cast of Grease and sitting at a 50’s diner drinking a strawberry milkshake.
The main
thing I love about the group is that they aren’t a same old indie rock band.
They’ve captured something different and although it’s not original in any way,
it’s a style that these days, there’s not a lot of in the main stream (but tonnes in all the right places, of course).
Ooh and they appear to be touring quite heavily around the UK, so go check 'em out for me, ok?
Official Website: http://www.vincentvincentandthevillains.com
The Enemy - This Song
In contrast to what I have just written above, the new single from Coventry-based band,The Enemy, This Song, is exactly what I mean when I ever refer to bands that have jumped upon the indie bandwagon. This Song sounds just like a song by Embrace… and when I first heard Embrace, I thought it was Oasis. I guess that sums up this single.
It’s quite
grandly a produced single, with a brass section and what sounds like a string
section (but most probably is synthesized); lots of echo and a feeling that something
very important is being said, but I’m not sure what that message could be.
There would be a wide berth of kids that The Enemy would appeal to though (an album debuting at No. 1 in the UK album charts confirms my suspicions of this... and I admit, i quite liked). This Song has a good tune, I’ll give it that!
The b-side however, a techno version of This Song, I kept expecting it to break into a round of “We’re gonna rock down to Electric Avenue”…. But it didn’t.
Prove me wrong and have a listen to them on their MySpace page. They're also currently touring so hop along and see them and let me know if they put on a good live show. I can only imagine that it would be, at least, 7 times better then their recordings.
alright..... back to it: Sally
