Who ever thought Coventry had it in it, eh? The scabby Metropolitan Borough in the West Midlands of England, cornerstone of the British Motor Industry and popular with Luftwaffe and 11th century peeping toms alike finally gets it’s day in the sun with a scraggy indie-pop five-piece called The Sequins who build upon the unlikely success of a couple of low-key singles (‘Nobody Dreams About Me’ – 2005 & ‘Patients’ – 2006) with a violent debut recalling Pulp, The Libertines and the Undertones at their most virile and acerbic.
The winning-formula for tracks as prickly and sharp as ‘Catholic Guilt’, ‘When The Flames Went Out’ and ‘Treehouses’? Well on the one hand you have a bevy of scruffy rhythm guitars jostling for speaker space with one-finger solos and breaking surf-riffs and on the other you have the frothy crash and fizz of classic ‘Ringo drumming’, stop-start time-signatures and the wonderfully elastic falsetto of Hywel Roberts’s vibrating ‘post-Sparks’ vocal. It’s sounds unlikely, but it works! With all the nervous, agitated vigour of an Asperger’s sufferer, Roberts covers such subjects as girls you know, girls you want to know better and girls you just wanna pass up with just a smattering of domestic violence, drug deals, fights, hazardous friendships and things you never thought you’d do.
It’s provincial. It’s industrial and it drives around in circles. What better way to illustrate the tingle that runs down your spine and the hairs that stand up on your neck than the scruffy post-modernist pop of these masterly breakneck S-tunes.