Yorkshire, that historic county in northern England, has dominated much of the 20th century music scene, both in sound and in spirit: David Bowie, himself of Yorkshire heritage, recorded seminal album "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" with three musicians from Hull; Sheffield's Def Leppard crashed to worldwide success on the back of 1983's "Pyromania" and 1987's "Hysteria"; more recently, the post-punk revival movement of the noughties has seen Yorkshire produce Kaiser Chiefs (named after former Leeds Football Club Lucas Radebe's former club). And the fastest-selling debut album in British music history is still Arctic Monkeys' "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not". Pulp's 1995 era-defining hit, the witheringly biting "Common People", was the penetratingly cynical yin to Oasis' sneering, swaggering yang. Oh yeah. Pulp. Or more specifically, the steel city's outsider par excellence, Jarvis Cocker. The latter features prominently on Horse Guards Parade's live CV, having been selected to support him in 2009, and it's not hard to see the similarities. Whilst "Ten Songs" may lack the arch witticisms and sleek pop sensibility of Pulp's "Different Class", Horse Guards Parade's own brand of lyrical abstraction and cryptic lonerisms is decidedly Cockeresque.
"Ten Songs" kicks off as it means to go on, with the late-night anthem for the alienated, "Everybody's Going Back To Your House", in which James Waudby drawls "Everybody's going back to your house/to be loved again/well I'm not going back there/I don't need to be loved". Backed by a shifty groove and swimming in languid guitars, Waudby's lyrics of disillusion and wilful disenchantment may feel slightly passé, but the detached distaste with which he dismisses the scene and its "fakes and the phonies/the pointless and the rest" gives it a soothing, sedative quality.
This abhorrence at society's populist norms resurfaces in "How Can You Take Me Dancing?", a seething stab of writhing psychedelica, which combines biting sarcasm and unconcealed revulsion ("If it looks like I'm not smiling/it's probably because I'm not"). And as the caustic guitar takes hold and runs amok, Waudby follows up with what borders on loathing, spitting the line "If you don't like the way that I'm smiling/well it's the only smile I've got". Chugging, Rembrandt-referencing acid rocker, "The Treble Clef", closes on a similar sentiment ("I say:/a warm heart/and a sunny disposition/will only help you fall"). Even when it comes, salvation - in a depressingly familiar turn - is only to be found at the bottom of the bottle (the redemptive honky-tonk boogie of "The Lies").
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Mixing hand-woven misanthropy and weary resignation in equal measures, Horse Guards Parade's full-length debut offers little respite to its tales of anguish and dejection. The restless "As The Plane Lifted Its Wheels", a spaghetti western forged in Hull, all galloping guitars and Yorkshire prairie skiffle, sees Waudby retreat to the Yorkshire fields in the wake of a departed love; yet, even when the protagonist emerges from his self-imposed reclusion, such as in the suggestively titled "It Ended In A Haze", he still appears lost and alone.
The transformation of the latter from a slide guitar-fuelled bucolic dream of flapping pheasants and brook frolicking to grotesque animal imagery ("as rent starved foals appear to gorge themselves/on battered stoat and curried vole") and the growing feeling that all is not as it seems ("A hoof stained fist alive and tasted/ on your lips") is just one thread of the band's taste for enigmatic turns of phrase. Perhaps the most striking of their track titles, "She Looked Like A Henry Moore" bends phrases like the celebrated abstract sculptor's undulating forms, the blurry shape of the unnamed female as faceless as the Yorkshire artist's reclining figures.
These darkly tinged stories of social iconoclasts and broken-down cynicism, coupled with the slow-burning nature of the album (epitomised in the gleaming, beautifully mournful "The City's On Fire") may sound on paper an unremitting, rather unpleasant prospect: but much like Pulp did in the nineties, Horse Guards Parade have made the hopeless social outcast an art form, albeit one that remains close to the shifting shapes of Jean Arp and the troubling distortion of Picasso.
Essential tracks: "This City's On Fire", "How Can You Take Me Dancing?", "She Looked Liked A Henry Moore"
Horse Guards Parade online
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