The fact that the London-centric music media has sacrificed objectivity for ad revenue and gleefully lap up the lukewarm diarrhoea served up by the music industry has sadly caused some people to completely give up on new music. Whilst the press waxes lyrical about the latest musical mediocrity, replete with a headline that would cause even Upworthy to die of shame bigging up the new saviours of whatever genre ‘big music’ have decreed needs reviving; let us be clear, this is not indicative of the real state of new music. So take heart because Leeds foursome Post War Glamour Girls have thundered into view to restore your faith in new music, to shake you from your torpor and to lift the scales from your eyes (and ears) with their quite magnificent début album ‘Pink Fur.’
It’s an album, which is the perfect riposte to the veritable tsunami of vacant Brit-School electro-soul arse-wankery which seems to have clogged up music blogs and ‘tastemaker’ lists of late. Post War Glamour Girls prove there is an intelligent, challenging and utterly compelling alternative. This is a band who deliver each line like a f**king punch to the kidneys. A band that possess the sort of caustic wit, wisdom, and literate wordplay that the legendary punk poet who provided inspiration for their collective name would surely approve of. Make no mistake this is a band to believe in, a band to get passionate about and a band who know that the world is wrong about everything.
The album starts on an implausibly high note with the epic ‘Sestra.‘ It juxtaposes singer and guitarist James Smith’s impassioned stentorian growl, which rumbles like the presage to a great storm with bassist Alice Scott’s sonorous glacial tones and sets the standard for the rest of the album. It’s almost impossible to pick out highlights from an album that dazzles from start to finish. ‘Jazz Funerals’ starts off sounding like the best song the Doors didn’t record ‘ Service Station Blues’ has the visceral power of early Pixies whilst ‘Stolen Flowers Rust’ and ‘Brat’ have the sonic thunder, apocalyptic rage and unnerving intense menace of Killing Joke. Nick Cave’s blood curdling slaughterhouse balladry is oft referenced when describing Post War Glamour Girls and true enough, the adroit lyricism and impassioned fire and brimstone delivery are in evidence, but here’s the thing, Post War Glamour Girls don’t actually sound like anybody else other than themselves. They are so much more than musical archaeologists simply dredging up and reanimating corpses from the past; they are shaping the future with a singular vision and sense of purpose.
With ‘Pink Fur’ Post War Glamour Girls have delivered an uncompromising, confrontational idiosyncratic and utterly astounding début album, which closes with a line that sums up the brilliance of this band, spat out with the venomous disdain of a young Mark E.Smith – “you strike me as the kind of person who has never made love before – therefore you are easily satisfied in general and with everything.” One cannot help but think uneasy lies the crown on the head of the NME’s anointed “greatest ever lyrist” Alex Turner, who will doubtless be quietly sobbing into his beer mumbling ‘Eee by eck…. it were grand while it lasted..’ when he hears this superb album.
9.5/10
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