If Film School’s eponymously titled debut album, released back at the start of 2006, was considered to be operating somewhat under the looming grip of Interpol’s vast shadow – and to a point, although not exclusively, it was – then turning up a few months after the strikingly morose New Yorkers’ latest and bravest release (though perhaps not hippest) they’ve got the same battle to pull the shapes that will distinguish them as a unique enough proposition to give a damn about. With a momentum already built up by their debut they readily take that challenge. And their main technique, to steal a turn of phrase from Interpol (and this will be the last time we mention them), is to turn up the bright lights. Or the blue lights at least, a smattering of strobes and probably a serious pumping of dry ice. This is shoegaze, to the greatest extent their necks can stretch.
‘Plots and Plans’ and ‘Lectric’ are suckling a teat each of pure Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine sauce. ‘Sick Hipster Nursed By Suicide Girl’ is eyes down hyperdrive indie, comatose visions floating just wide of the Jesus & Mary Chain. And when they do go back to the more defined shape of their first record on ‘Two Kinds’ they evoke ‘Disintegration’ period The Cure.
Where on the last album there were firm monochrome pillars off which the songs were suspended to sashay in gusts of numbing guitar effects and humid melodies, thrust forth by persuasive and prominent bass-lines, the dazzle of the static has increased so that you can barely make out their form and thus lose yourself in a sea of buzzing and slightly anxious tranquillity. Though that’s not to say the rhythm is any less beguiling this time, just that it avoids your direct gaze and works together with the wider spectrum of sound to swallow you whole. Making you largely unaware of whether you’re under the cast of a larger shadow or not.