Music Review: <i>Thieves</i> - British India
After their impressive debut album, Guillotine, the evocatively-named Australian punk rock band British India returns with Thieves.
The album begins with some classic strumming on “God is Dead, Meet the Kids” and ‘woo-hoo’ hums that would not be out of place in a more jejune band’s repertoire. As the song proceeds, it gets better (and harder), creating an atmosphere of post-Modernist ruin and neglect, ‘neon lights’ and ‘unspoken truths’
The hard and distortion-heavy “This Dance is Loaded’ layers self-centredness (”it’s so rare that we need somebody else”) with teenage angst about “fucked up dances”. This is one song that makes you stand up and shout, tap a beat, and wiggle your ears.
“I Said I’m Sorry” is the first single from the album, a more radio-friendly song and with a traditional rock beat. Everything from the drums to the bass track to the steady vocals indicate a band maturing to its true potential. This is the kind of song that lingers and hopefully makes a lasting impression on the band’s future ouevre.
“Put it Right Down” doesn’t leave much of a mark, at least for me, being rather generic in structure, yet quite in keeping with the album’s tenor. The song attempts to redeem itself in the final third, not to much avail.
“Funeral For A Trend” redeems the band, being a Beatles-esque ballad, the lyrics murmuring about an ‘avalanche of golden teeth’ and how the singer’s ‘chest is caving in’. The guitar work and slow-paced drum beat provide counterpoint to the menacing theme of the song. The song evokes the loss of a
great relationship (”Long time no see, where have you been/Before I get to say it you get taken away/You never go but you never stay”)
“Airport Tags” is a hopeful ditty about growing up and losing what mattered once, and doesn’t any more, about believing that things could revert to a halcyon state and the wishful thinking that “tonight everything’s going to change’. The hope (”Airport tags, she was gone now she’s coming back/I was worried but it’s not that bad/Nothing much has changed”) is belied by the reality (”So hang yourself in the bedroom at your parents’ house/Watch as all your best friends gather round/And you might feel loved/Tonight everything’s going to change”)
“You Will Die And I Will Take Over” gives us the anti-establishment line that is de rigeur in punk. The twist is the apparent realization that the next generation is still more of the same (”A clever clone out on his own”), the systems that make us are the ones that keep us (”When your dad had his heart attack we watched it all on videotape/His shirt was ironed, his teeth were white/He clutched his chest like a commercial break”).
“Mona Lisa Overdrive”, also the title of the final volume of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, is a dark song about a crime committed in the heat of passion. The protagonist has been fed some laced drinks (’My mouth is filling with glass/My blood is laced with caffeine”), and he will be ‘dead in an hour’. That is more likely an illusion of the archetypal breakup, the final drink, while ‘a taxi is coming now’. He has the realization that “I’ve been through this before, i hoped I never would again/As girls shine like magazines
Avoid us falling like masonry/I had to ask myself, what are you thinking”. The music is appropriately enough bass-heavy and the rhythm guitar sneaks in at the end with a few choice chords that wrap up one of the best songs on the album.
“Nic the Poet” deals with the general know-it-all awareness every generation has that its fucked up and powerless to do anything about it. “Twenty thousand kids all on their mobile phones” refuse to accept that “This party is finished, give us xanax and fifteen minutes”. The poet’s call to “change the station this bottled water generation” will be ignored, after all they’re just “four white boys getting high tonight”.
The final song “The golden years” is a gentle ballad, giving prominence to Declan Melia’s vocals, a memory of growing up and growing away, of wanting to get back to the temps perdu. The mature realization is that “These golden years that we are drowning in, we’ll spend our whole lives trying to get to one place we don’t want to be.
This is an album, then, of growing up, of coming of age, and by poets of yet another lost generation.
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