Someone needs to teach New Rhodes some fucking manners.
As if loading up the review copies of new album Songs From The Lodge with so much encryption that our computers seize up the instant we try to play it on them wasn't bad enough, New Rhodes then hilariously leave the first 30 seconds of Songs From The Lodge opener You've Given Me Something That I Can't Give Back silent so that we a) turn the volume up as loud as we can and b) lean in really close straining our ears so that when the song eventually does burst screaming from the speakers we almost fall backwards off our chairs in shock. So New Rhodes unanimously deserve a slap for making listening to Songs From The Lodge an uphill struggle to start with, but what about the actual music itself?
When you think of Bristol, classic windswept indie probably isn't the first thing you think of. Massive Attack might be, or all those 12-year-old heroin addict prostitutes that we saw on the news once, but not radio-friendly Smiths-y guitar music. And certainly not radio-friendly Smiths-y guitar music that has got music critics masturbating furiously like a policeman on a train as New Rhodes are currently doing with new album Songs From The Lodge. "One of the finest eccentric guitar orientated pop bands this nation has produced since The Smiths" said Drowned in Sound, while Zoo magazine noted that New Rhodes have "great songs that make the Ordinary Boys look ordinary," which entirely neglects to mention that even the sound of a middle-aged accountant named Jeremy fastidiously wiping dust off his collection of treasury tags makes the Ordinary Boys sound ordinary.
So we've so far ascertained that New Rhodes have a) heaps of critical acclaim and b) an annoying approach to manufacturing promo CDs but – as far as music goes – Songs From The Lodge by New Rhodes is… well, it's OK in a sort of 'could appeared on any of the mid-nineties Shine compilation CDs without sounding at all futuristic' kind of way. And that works both for and against New Rhodes.
First the good news. Songs From The Lodge by New Rhodes is stuffed to the gills with tunes as strong as oxes. You've Given Me Something That I Can't Give Back – once it eventually starts – is a tight bundle of indie energy, while She Said No is a self-propelled burst of indie with a soaring chorus that The Stokes would cut their arms off to own.
Ah, yes – The Strokes. There's a very good chance that New Rhodes have heard one or two songs by The Strokes, since Songs From The Lodge almost acts like a The Strokes For Dummies case study. You can hear it in the taut basslines and the quiver in New Rhodes singer James Williams' croon and – most specifically – the way that the first two lines of recent single The History Of Britain are exactly the same as the first two lines of The Modern Age. In fact, if you imagine that The Strokes were brought up as four mostly anonymous blokes in leafy Somerset instead of being iconically good-looking kids from the streets of New York, that's pretty much New Rhodes in a nutshell.
But to make up for their crushing lack of charisma, New Rhodes have filled Songs From The Lodge with big tunes. And when we say 'big', we mean 'album-closer big'. Huge songs. Epic songs. And that's another problem – the last four tracks on Songs From The Lodge by New Rhodes are so almighty that we actually expect the album to end when each one finishes. And when they're followed by another song we get a bit more restless, like we did when the last Lord Of The Rings movie refused to finish after an hour and a half of different endings.
Songs From The Lodge by New Rhodes, then: you won't turn the radio off when Jo Wiley invariably plays it to death, but actually owning it is another matter entirely.
Buy Songs From The Lodge by New Rhodes from Amazon if you like
[story by Stuart Heritage]
