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Eastern Lane 'The Article'
There are many ways of initiating a period of bad luck. Spilling the milk. Breaking a mirror. Seeing a magpie and not saluting it. Walking under a ladder. Saying pig on Friday. Err, wait a minute. Pig? On? Friday? ACH! Ssssh! See, on a small Island near Berwick-Upon-Tweed, it’s deemed bad luck to say aforementioned bad word on a Friday. In turn, pigs need to be referred too as an ‘Article’. Honestly, Eastern Lane couldn’t have made it up.
‘The Article’ is the sound of a band breaking every mirror in the house and recording the after-effects. Eastern Lane might be barely out of their teens, but this, their second album, is the sound of a band who’ve learned to turn edgy, panicky paranoia into three-minute shots of adrenaline. Indeed, anyone who saw this band a year ago, will be shocked by the demonic leap the songs have taken. As Derek Meins spits’n’snarls his way through a string of great one-liners (“If I were holy/I would remember us in my prayers”), it seems that Rough Trade may have found the band that could eventually match The Libertines for rock’n’roll thrills. At times sounding like a cross between that band and the angular quirkiness of British Sea Power, they’ve also found the Morrissey/Marr knack of matching killer melodies to jarring, spiky guitar sounds.
‘I Said Pig On Friday’ resembles a ramshackle, drunk Bloc Party (this is a good thing, no?), building up to a crashing chorus built around the wise words of, umm, a tit-lover, “Love is a glove that does not fit/The pussy, the folly, the tit!” screams Meins, cheekily dropping sexual metaphors as subtly as a fart in a lift. ‘Feed Your Addiction’, meanwhile, sounds like prime-era Smiths, the lyrics as poignant and immediate as anything that’s stumbled from Morrissey’s mouth over the past decade and ‘No.5’ shudders and stomps like a Libertines that can stay in time with each other. They’re not limited to three-minute explosions, either; right bang in the middle of the album lies one melancholic lonely-man-at-the-bar piano song (‘I Feel Liberated’) and one Oh Brother, Where Art Thou crossroads-gospel chant (‘Wait A Little Longer’).
It might struggle to live up to just how good the first seven songs are, but ‘The Article’ shows a bloody, naive excitement that promises much for Eastern Lane’s future. No matter how many times you say Pig on Friday. Or any other day, for that matter.
Eastern Lane 'The Article' (Rough Trade) Released February 7 2005.
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