Leeds based quartet THE PRINTED SOUND have kindly delivered unto us two of their spanking new songs ‘The Announcement’ and ‘Lips’.
If I’d heard these tracks a couple of years ago or even a year ago I may have been excited by their potential. As spiky and punky, jagged and bouncy as these tracks are I’ve now plenty of it in my record collection to sustain me over the coming months and have decided to hold a moratorium on future purchases of such music until someone in the 21st Century round of New Wave raises the ante and unleashes something different.
My money’s on Franz Ferdinand having the ability and the wherewithal to head away from the pack but we’ll just have to wait and see.
In the meantime if your appetite is still unsatiated (still? STILL!) for yet more stuff that sounds like Bloc Party, The Futureheads etc. then The PRINTED SOUND may well satisfy your cravings.
Amazingly on this brace of tunes the band have managed to base their sound on just one song, that song being The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’ and on ‘The Announcement’ have decided to not bother trying to disguise the fact. ‘Lips’ is a facsimile of ‘The Announcement’ but with a piece of tracing paper over the top to slightly blur the fact that it’s a copy. It’s all played with some zip and complete competence but is still guilty of lazy and heavy-handed musical tomb raiding.
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I can’t help but feel second time around that if you deprive New Wave of its original punk aesthetic, its uniquely forged political and cultural overtones and the heroic single-mindedness of its ground-breaking practitioners, in 2005 it all amounts to little more than musical ephemera or just a briefly diverting game of ‘Spot The Influences’. First time around the music coexisted so inescapably with the youthful turbulence of its times that its short, sharp shock arrangements ring hollow if isolated from their historical context in a way that other musical time zones do not.
So as fast and as spirited as these songs are they have no sense of the almost desperate urgency that was inherent in New Wave circa 1979: which is no fault of THE PRINTED SOUND but is a dull facet of the grey and tempered times in which occupants of The Western World live these days.
Must lie down now.
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