They’re wide open for pot shots. Indie band squatting off-piste on infamously innovative electro label. Indie band as topical and new-wave as the next. Indie band that sound like another indie band that already exists just down the road. So are Maximo Park just The Futureheads, on the wrong label, without the definitive head-shaking harmonies and money spinning cover version, and only the A184 separating them? Well, absolutely not. And then yes, a bit. There’s no ignoring the similarities that exist, and there is no denying that the usually niche Warp Records funding the whole affair is uber-peculiar with sauce on the side, but most importantly there can be no mistaking that they have risen up with ‘A Certain Trigger’ to answer critics and make the bastards shimmy.
This is simply a bullish retro-pop album, stretching at the seams with efficient quirks and amphetamine beats, sherbet fountain melodies and grounded, inspired, unfussy lyrical couplets waterlogged by soul-affirming North-Eastern accents, which is how they will refuse to leave the mind of anyone who gives them half a chance to get a grip. It’s a familiar identity parade – The Jam, XTC, The Stranglers – but the production is so fabulous, crisp, electric, and the posture so assured and personal, it’s not like you’re left stuck in 1981 without a key-code for the Tardis. Its details makes it a divine candidate too for both the headphones and the disco. There might be too much here in fact, but like getting change for a twenty from a five.
‘Signal & Sign’, ‘Apply Some Pressure’, and ‘Now I’m All Over The Shop’ especially do evoke the blunt/brisk technicalities of The Futureheads (the latter almost a carbon copy of ‘First Day’), but they prove themselves competitive enough to follow behind so closely, and that they can take the lead sometimes. ‘Graffiti’ is like The Animals on elastic bands. ‘Postcard Of A Painting’ is a dainty Libertines-esque raid of Paul Weller’s youth which radiates with a determined competence that eluded the aforementioned fashionable Londoners, handing them this chorus would be like giving The Others a crossword. ‘Once, A Glimpse’ gives a nod to The Specials and the brilliant ‘Acrobat’ supplies the only real clue to Warp’s involvement, being desolate and ambient, like David Bowie fronting Arab Strap covering Soft Cell. And it should be noted that Crud is shimmying just a little now.