A follow-up to the band’s ever so slightly disappointing Domino debut, ‘Limbo Panto’, ‘Two Dancers’ sees the Leeds/Kendal four-piece exchange the ‘fascinating’ but frequently ‘fathomless’ and unruly afro-pop trickery that marred such blissfully tender paeans as ‘The Devils Crayon’ for a far less chaotic celebration of all that is eloquent and ugly about old Blighty – whether that’s the not unsubstantial charms of the girls in Whitby and Hounslow or the thrilling, appalling beauty of receiving a good kicking at the hands of delinquent brutes during a Saturday night ‘boot ballet’. And at last they’ve got the balance right: brutally skewed and amusing records of teenage life giftwrapped in the most flamboyant of wordplay and meted out with all the sophistication and finesse of Liberace and a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera.
On the one hand we have Hayden Thorpe’s spectacularly undisciplined falsetto leaping around the band’s gravely entertaining ‘Hooting and Howling’ like some preening David McAlmont-sort and on the other we have the well-oiled, oaky baritone of Ben Little who brings to the rapturous and unflappable ‘Two Dancers’ (II) what Andy Williams brought to ‘Moon River’. It’s like Jimmy Mercer and Henry Mancini had a ‘Freaky Friday’ makeover with two youths pulled out of a ping-pong tournament at a Youth Club in Cumbria and find themselves swapping the brutish smash and grab of a pack of Tennents Super and a hand-job around the back of the local Spar for a pair of velvet smoking jackets and a couple of sensible partners with whom to waltz. And that’s the whole point: it’s ‘youth’ Jim, but not as we know it, ordinary lives told in an extraordinary manner and rendered almost unrecognisable by the sheer beauty of the job in hand.
More subdued than it’s predecessor, songs like, ‘We Still Got The Taste Dancin’ on Our Tongues’ offer the kind of moody introspection previously imagined by artists like the Associates and ‘lesser’ 80s synth-pop bands like The Lotus Eaters and Japan.
It’ shamelessly over-poetic, disgracefully ostentatious yet ‘quiffed and cropped’ by some of the most delightful tunes you’re likely to hear this year.
There’s a point at which the ‘fascinating’ tips magically in favour of the ‘fabulous’ – and this is that point.
