“Just drift along with no focus or meaning,” utter they, maybe in partial self review, as their debut album slopes off to a stop. You can barely move at the moment without being thwacked between the eyes by a giddy globule of praise for this one particular example of London-centric new-wave. There can be no disputing that they would never have attained that without focus, without subscribing pointedly to a set of expectations, to what they directed themselves to become. And water couldn’t fall through the cracks in these songs. But meaning?
Meaning suggests an insightful participation in, and an intrinsic understanding of, something much bigger. An accidental or inevitable unraveling of tangled strands of shared experience. Those carrying the praise are claiming they’ve cracked the pin-code to the zeitgeist too. To just acknowledge something though does not give it meaning.
We all take what we can from songs, from their lyrics and their suggestions. And there is little doubt that the subject matter contained within ‘Capture/Release’s 11 tracks could strike a jagged chord with most, dealing as they do with the mundane and ritualistic aspects of modern social behaviour that we’re all strapped to, variously. So when Alan Donohoe announces “this is a truuuue story” at the beginning of ‘The Guilt’ and then shrieks in annoying amateur dramatic mockney accent “I had just woke up! Everything was facked!” when recalling the night before and sleeping with a girl he didn’t know (“she was overweight,” by the way), we don’t doubt that it is true, we’re just waiting for the context, the justification, the dissection of the issue. It never comes.
Previous celebrated purveyors of this form of social documentary, The Streets and Hard-Fi, have ensured their infamy through their studied eloquence, narrative forming and, in the former’s case especially, the ability to bring blunt enlightening poetry to something as unlikely as having a kebab. Next to those examples this feels like lazy appraisal, more copying down than documentary. Their last two singles ‘Retreat’ (“Walk home, come down, retreat to sleep! Wake up, go out again, repeat!”) and ‘Work Work Work (Pub, Club, Sleep)’ had already suggested only a repetitive rudimentary grasp of their craft.
All of this doesn’t make for a bad album though, just not a great or important one. There is undoubtedly some blasted effective guitar work, efficient and direct, almost Graham Coxon-esque in its interpretation of The Clash, The Stranglers and The Jam. And their debut single ‘22 Grand Job’, included here in re-recorded technicolor, is a bundle of infectious sonic whiplash, with wit and irreverence in the right measure. ‘Animals’ too, somewhere between Elastica and The Fall, doesn’t sound overdone and succeeds where trying too hard fails elsewhere. The album should have continued like that, the content should have given it direction, it was primed after all. Talking about such normal stuff has been proved to capture the imagination, here it just sounds, well, ordinary.