What is it about Kendal that insists on dispatching us up tor and lofty crag with little more than a half-pound of mint-cake, a pair of stout walking boots and the shortest of guitar straps imaginable? Hayden Thorpe just like his Lake District brother, ‘Yan’ Wilkinson of fellow Kendal mint-band, British Sea Power both wear their guitars somewhere just short of their neck line and both are responsible for staging some of the most theatrical costume spectacles this side of a Wayne Coyne walking-bubble. An exotic falsetto, a little music hall, some bunk beds, a pair of drooping breasts and some bizarrely ticklish ivories.
After being rather excited by the band’s single ‘Assembly’ at the back end of 2007, I have to say I’m a little disappointed by the band’s full length debut. Recorded in Malmo Sweden with Tore Johannson (The Cardigans, Martha Wainwright, Franz Ferdinand) the album is somewhat drowned by Thorpe’s ‘enormous falsetto’ and the band’s failure to match it with anything approaching the same kind of drama and intensity. It is only when the able baritone of the band’s second vocalist, Tom Fleming commands the speaker that the whole thing falls together – in the same way a children’s party falls together with the arrival of the cake – and because of this, tracks like ‘His Grinning Skull’ stand out like ports in a storm.
Comes somewhere between The Cardiacs, XTC, Monty Python and a Year 7 assembly. Eccentric but not duff.
