Ratboys ‘The Window’ – Review

Ratboys have been making Alt-Rock with Country vibes for the best part of a decade and largely gone unnoticed. But in 2023, in the wake of Waxahatchee, Socer Mommy and Snail Mail, they are positioned to ascend. This stuff is catnip for critics at the moment, and ‘The Window’ ticks a lot of boxes: it’s clever, regionally specific, rootsy but artful, and unapologetically ambitious. Imagine Wednesday with fewer paper cuts. 

There is a spit and polish here that gives the initial impression that Ratboys are selling out and cashing in. At points the album sounds immaculate, replicating the rich and inviting sound of Classic Country Rock without ever feeling dated. ‘The Window’ was produced by Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie, Tegan and Sara, Foxing) in the storied Hall of Justice Studios studios, which only adds to the sense of a band going out of their way to level up.

But thankfully they can’t keep it up across the whole record. A smattering of songs retain a scuzzy sound and frantic energy that will endear ‘The Window’ to Rat Boys small but devoted audience. ‘Crossed that Line’ is a fuzzy nugget about… is it regret or satisfaction? Hard to tell. ‘It’s Alive’ is a little meatier but has a softness as well; When the harmonies come in like a soft summer breeze you can’t help thinking that lead singer Julia Steiner sounds a little like Sheryl Crowe.

The obvious centrepiece though is ‘Black Earth, WI’ a nine minute Rock odyssey that the band recorded live to tape and boldly chose to put out as lead single. Here melodic guitar solos battle it out for five minutes in a way that would make Tom Petty or Neil Young proud. Lyrically as well, the song earns its length by detailing an old infatuation with memorable intensity. ‘With one almighty lightning strike the Great Lake rose up behind and said “baby you better turn around.”’ It’s at this point that the guitars come into centre frame and the walls start to feel like they’re closing in.

The writing isn’t always so sharp though. ‘Empty’ tries to sell frustration with blunt repetition but the effect is simply grating. See also ‘No Way’ which circles around a coda of ‘there’s no way you’ll control me’ for what feels like a lifetime. Steiner is a talented writer when everything comes together in the right way but those moments don’t arrive quite as frequently as we may desire. ‘The Window’ is a really good record, maybe Ratboys best, but it’s inconsistent.

One moment where everything does fall into place is the title track, easily one of the year’s most affecting ballads. At the height of the pandemic, Julia Steiner’s grandmother was dying, isolated in her bedroom due to social distancing rules. Her husband of 60 years, Julia’s grandfather, said his goodbyes through an open window. The song is told from her Grandfather’s point of view. Even before I knew of the context, I found the song almost unbearably moving. The heartbreak is palpable. But this is a song that ultimately feels uplifting – it doesn’t wallow as one might expect. In the middle 8 Steiner sings ‘Sue, Sue, you’ll always be my girl’ and it feels life affirming. Here Ratboys achieve in ten seconds everything they’ve set out to.

7.5/10

Review Round-up

Disclosure ‘Alchemy’

Disclosure’s fourth studio album, and first on their own label, is also their first to feature no samples of guest appearances. This is a point of pride for the group, who undoubtedly got a bit caught up in the idea of being young tastemakers while simultaneously losing sight of their own quality control. ‘Alchemy’ doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of debut ‘Settle’, still one of the best Dance records this side of the millennium, but its breezy, retro vibe ensures a lot of low-key wins. A sense of heartbreak lingers in the lyrics of ‘We Were in Love’ and ‘Looking for Love’ but the tempo never allows for moping. ‘Alchamy’ incorporates Garage, Trance and Dub-Step influences but largely settles on a bright House-pop sound that plays to the duo’s strengths. Not destined to move the needle but ‘Alchemy’ feels like a tentative return to form.

7/10

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Beach Fossils ‘Bunny’

True to their name, Beach Fossils feel like a long lost relic unearthed from the distant past. At least, 2010 feels like the distant past to me now. Beach Fossils were part of that brilliant movement that foregrounded simplicity with indie-pop songs about being young, in love, and living by the coast (see also Real Estate, The Drums and Diiv). ‘Bunny’ contains most of the ingredients that made the band influential way back when and if anything they sound better than ever: creamy baselines and amber coloured guitar jangles, fuzzy production that lets just enough light in and a hazy sense of nostalgia for something too vague to pin down. Fans will feel satisfied enough and, encouragingly, there is a sense that Beach Fossils’ audience is widening all the time. This autumn they will open for Post Malone on his arena tour. Tik-tok is partly to thank, I believe. That’s not something you would have seen coming in 2010.

8/10

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Zach Bryan ‘Zach Bryan’

Zach Bryon is a burgeoning singer-songwriter who received rave reviews in 2022 with ‘American Heartbreak’, a promising triple album that recommended Bryan as Country’s next big thing. His new self titled record narrows the focus to 16 songs and a more cohesive sound, though it still feels a little more super-sized than would be advisable. Bryan positions himself somewhere between the indie leaning confessionalism of Ryan Adams and Jason Isbell, and the more pop adjacent side of the genre, currently dominated by Morgan Wallen. But truthfully Bryan never raises the temperature enough to get close enough to either. Bryan’s songs, while tuneful and well crafted, feel a little too tepid. Across an hour the pace sags and the emotions become predictably crusty. Hit song ‘I Remember Everything’ – an enigmatic ballad performed with intensity – is an obvious highlight, as is the spoken word intro, so reminiscent of Bright Eyes, but too many of the other songs tread over the same old ground in an increasingly laboured way. There is better to come from Zach Bryan. 

6/10 

Gia Margaret ‘Romantic Piano’ – Review

There won’t be many people who hear the words ‘minimalist piano record’ and drop what they’re doing but Gia Margeret’s ‘Romantic Piano’ is quietly becoming one of my favourite albums of 2023. This mostly instrumental collection does as it says on the tin – its romantic and there’s plenty of piano. But here you will find shades and layers that make this more than simply elevator music. I think it’s the melodies, which have a haunting quality, amplified by production that allows ambient sounds to intrude: bird noises, footsteps, TV hum, cicadas, the physicality of pedals being pressed. The field recordings lend the record a lived in quality and diminish the formality and stiffness that can sometimes be associated with this kind of thing. 

Margaret, who has a distinctive singing voice when she uses it, turned to the piano during the pandemic when she felt “lost for words.” She instinctively went to the instrument that she’d learnt as a child and scarcely returned to since, in order to evoke feelings that were struggling to articulate themselves in other ways. The songs she composed were short and relatively simple; most clock in under 2 minutes and almost all are constructed around spare, delicate piano performances. Over time you realise that the word romantic is being used in the classical sense; the album, which is thoroughly connected to the natural world through the field recordings,  conveys a deeply rooted melancholy and pining for something long gone.

The one song with vocals, ‘City Song’, is placed deliberately in the dead centre of the record, as if everything before is leading up to it, and everything after comes in its wake. In a sense ‘City Song’ is more mysterious and unknowable than the tracks without lyrics. It begins with Margaret remembering a night in a hotel. Some things come quickly to mind – the revolving doors, the birds flying outside – and others don’t. ‘I can’t really say where the memories fade but some are burnt into my brain.’ Margaret’s voice, almost a whisper, longs to understand something beyond understanding; longs to see something that has already gone. What is left is less than a ghost. Her voice is splintered into different tracks, one of which is pitch distorted beyond recognition. It adds to the sense of distance. ‘With one arm reaching out, I can almost feel you’ she sings, in barely more than a whisper.

I think the other songs are trying to say the same thing in their own way. It’s the piano notes that are reaching out, grasping for something that they can’t quite pin down. And it all adds up to something very moving. These relatively simple songs are so much more than the sum of their parts. Margret herself has conceded that there are better pianists than her out there, but very few musicians are able to translate such deeply felt longing into music as she does.

Album closer ‘Cinnamon’ is devastatingly beautiful. As rain pours outside, Margret presses forlornly on the piano keys, creating a melody that circles on a simple motif, trying to find consistency in familiarity perhaps. Its hues are as grey as the shades on the record’s album sleeve. There, Margaret is pictured staring out into the clouds, mouth slightly agape, eyes hidden by a lock of hair, fixed on something in the distance. Somewhere beyond the clouds, you can almost hear the piano playing.

8/10

The Clientele ‘I Am Not There Anymore’ – Review

The Clientelle have been releasing records for 25 years. Over that time they have become known for a very quaint, somewhat old fashioned, type of indie-pop. Initially making their name with a series of 7’inch singles, The Clientelle became defined by a “less is more” philosophy. Albums, they thought, are often ‘too long and boring.’ Their fleeting miniatures – dreamy, romantic, subtily psychedelic – were best experienced a little at a time. A and B sides. It’s somewhat surprising then that their new album, ‘I am Not There Anymore’ should be an ambitious, experimental, double album. Even more surprising – it’s their best work yet.

The record loosely connects memories of songwriter Alasdair Maclean’s childhood in suburban London to his mother’s protracted illness and death some years later. It would be wrong to call this topic the album’s focus as the precise details feel so out of focus. Images fade in and out of view as if battling heavy fog. Several sentences across the record begin with ‘I remember’ but what is being remembered is often mysteriously ambiguous. Take for example ‘I remember days at school when the only thing I knew – I was nobody at all.’ This kind of sentiment is echoed time and time again: ‘I’ve got something I can’t use, it’s a feeling that I am everywhere but only here with you’ and ‘sometimes I am walking home, at my door, I am not there anymore’. There is a sense throughout of memories folding in on themselves just as the outlines are becoming clear; a sense that these visions are as abstract for MacLean as they are for the listener. We are not really here and we are certainly not there. We are not even who we were and perhaps they weren’t sure who they were anyway. We are all occupying the same liminal spaces.

This is an album about those juxtaposing states we float between: past and the present, here and there, reality and fantasy, awake and asleep, presence and absence. As they say on one track, ‘all the beautiful things are opaque.’ Little here makes literal sense and yet there is something very knowable being itched across ‘I Am Not There Anymore’ – a feeling of vague nostalgia for a distant past not entirely erased. The song ‘My Childhood’ features the plumb voiced Jessica Griffin reading a poem over an atonal string arrangement. Each line begins with ‘my childhood is…’ before clouding into obfuscation. ‘My childhood is  mummified rain…my childhood is the news of travellers who see nothing… my childhood is is the chord behind another chord which was not played…’ All of which is to say, who really knows what childhood is?

From the beginning, the band establish the album’s relationship to a world that is familiar and unfamiliar at once. ‘Fables of the Silverlink’, the eight minute opener, is bursting with surreal imagery: nightingales rising from a black pond, morning rain hitting junkyards, blue sloes in wet grass. It’s beautifully precious. The song incorporates influences as diverse as Indian Classical music, Arabic Flamenco, Dub and psychedelic pop. The Clientelle are setting their stall out. Things won’t be as you remember. The song, in its length and intensity, sequenced right at the start of the record, could be perceived as antagonistic if it weren’t so pretty. The careful, unrepeating melody unspools so effortlessly that you barely even notice it’s length. 

The variety of cited influences on this album is extraordinary; everything from Rudyard Kipling to Boards of Canada, Trap music to Love’s ‘Forever Changes’. They blend together as thoughtfully as you would expect – The Clientele crafted the record over three years afterall. It still sounds thoroughly like a Clientele album but compared to the breathy indie-pop of their early records, ‘I Am Not There Anymore’ feels positively boundary pushing. 

Splintering the songs are a series of minimalist instrumentals written and performed on piano by the group’s drummer Martin Keen. These segues – somewhere between Ambient, Jazz, and Modern Classical – delicately exaggerate the space between songs, and the memories they contain, amplifying the sense of distance that is thematically intrinsic to the record. In the Clientelle’s thinking, these instrumental pieces act as palate cleansers between the heavier songs, allowing the listener to ‘look away so you can look back again.’ They work wonderfully. Their simple melodies are actually some of the most memorable on the album.

As with all Clientele records, the frequency of the recurring imagery suggests meanings we can scarcely glean: the dark blue of the spinny, hatchbacks rolling, a garden eye, an open hospice window. Why is it that all the villagers go looking for fire? And why is the villiage always on fire for that matter? Why all the references to doors? Is it Maclean’s mother, for example, standing at the door, putting on her child’s shoes in a memory? And why do so many of these characters view the world through glass? Question upon question hangs over this record, giving it a life beyond its running time. Many of these motifs will be familiar to fans of The Clientele; for notwithstanding the impressive reinventions at the heart of ‘I Am Not There Anymore’, perhaps the most impressive quality is how they’ve made something that is still recognisably theirs. Beyond the abstract sound collages, IDM beats and baroque flourishes is clearly a Clientele record. And an excellent one at that. 

9/10