Just think of all the cool stuff you get, as children and now, in kit form. Cars, Meccano sets, chemistry sets, model aeroplanes that you always used to run out of patience with before you’d super-glued on every last fiddly detail and, erm, nowadays flat-pick furniture? Well, it’s cheap, we are in an end-of-days recession you know. Anyway, it’s more hands on and it’s fun to use your hands. Red Light Company are about the most realised embodiment of that in band form Crud has ever come across – kit indie rock band, deluxe edition. Your impulse is probably to react vehemently against such a concept, there’s an unwritten rule that credibility cannot be assumed until every effort has been made to make a new creative contribution to a genre’s previous limitations, or preferably to re-write music’s entire base code from the ground up. Of course only an utter minuscule minority of acts ever come close to that, music by its very nature is a melding pot of existing influences and it’s just cheap re-hashes and lazy clones that really deserve your bile. If the myriad Libertines copycats wished any harder for a rose-tinted Albion, for instance, perhaps they’d bring back the death penalty in their honour.
Every idea on this album has already been road-tested, but then that’s why there are no mistakes. Of course it helps though that they’re so good at arranging and welding their raw materials – these are brilliantly strong songs. Most immediately they remind of Editors, but any other polished middle-hitters from the last few years would do; Feeder, Guillemots, Hard-Fi. ‘With Lights Out’ and ‘Meccano’ particularly sound like a marginally darker, gothic Delays, the melodies lightweight, summery and glucose laden but the drive diesel-powered and gritty. The gradual fanfare of the anthemic ‘When Everybody Is Everybody Else’ and sturdy authority of ‘Arts & Crafts’ remind of the atmospheric early-90s James, and ‘Scheme Eugene’ is outrageously immediate and has some of the carefree sunburst particular to Canadian indie-troupe Broken Social Scene, who they name-check in the chorus. So, Red Light Company are devoid of originality, their geography has been long mapped by Ordinance Survey, never mind Google Street-view, but that is their very strength. A fine record.