Hey there, every other indie band in the world. Listen, we need to talk. We had a good old crack at things, didn't we? Gave it our best shot. Look, we're just going to come out and say it – we've met someone new. You probably haven't heard of them – they're called The Blood Arm.
We didn't mean to cheat on you; it's just that, you know, you're kind of dull. And you could probably do with washing a bit more regularly. The Blood Arm, though, they know how to treat us right. We just met The Blood Arm, listened to their new album Lie Lover Lie and we couldn't help but realise that its just much more sexy, confident, funny and exciting than you are. So, every other indie band in the world, it's over. We're with Lie Lover Lie by The Blood Arm now, and – although it's early days – we think it might be love.
Pianos in indie music are generally a bit of a minefield; you have to keep a certain level of energy up or else you'll turn into Keane before you've realised it, sneaking into the Priory for your addiction to Sara Lee frozen cheesecakes and telling everyone that you're really in there for cocaine abuse. Go too far the other way and you run the risk of getting Rick Wakeman comparisons – and there's nothing guaranteed to get your newly-aquired hipster fanbase turning their back on you faster than one of those. On their debut album Lie Lover Lie, The Blood Arm approach the piano subject head-on and get it gloriously, spine-tinglingly right. Think My Doorbell by The White Stripes rather than Mandy by Barry Manilow and you're halfway there. Imagine every single song blazing out of your speakers and hitting you like a diamond bullet between the eyes and you've pretty much got Lie Lover Lie by The Blood Arm nailed.
The Blood Arm are apparently one of Franz Ferdinand's favourite bands, and it's not hard to see why – both bands tread the same glamorous, debauched, intelligent, punchy, exciting, invincibly self-confident ground as each other. Except, on the basis of Lie Lover Lie, The Blood Arm may have made an album that exceeds anything Franz have ever done. If you haven't heard Lie Lover Lie's first single Suspicious Character yet, then you're missing a gem – a giant-sized stomping groover of a tune, with an "I like all the girls and all the girls like me" chorus that's matched only by the ridiculously gleeful line "Every woman says to me/ oh ah ah ah ah ah ah oh ooh ah ah ah ah ah ah ah oh." If Suspicious Character had been released a couple of months earlier, then The Blood Arm would have quite easily scored their very first festival catchprase. Probably a good job that it came out in the middle of September, then.
The Blood Arm know the value of a well-placed handclap, too – Lie Lover Lie is littered with the bastards. Call it preemptive, because if The Blood Arm hadn't dropped them into songs like Stay Put! you'd have felt inclined to add them yourself, such is the slippery infectiousness of The Blood Arm. Lie Lover Lie seems to have been incubated on the live circuit, as every note of the album is infused with the hunger of a support act determined to blow the headliners off the stage – even going so far at one point as naming a song Do I Have Your Attention – and you can hear just how much The Blood Arm are enjoying themselves; it runs through Lie Lover Lie like a fat vein. Other Lie Lover Lie highlights can be found when Angela builds and builds until the line "I miss you like a nuclear bomb" throws the whole thing into a brand new direction, and in the way that PS I Love You But I Don't Miss You struts and preens and grins like the way you look in your head when you're drunk, rather than the dribbling slurring mess that's probably slightly closer to the truth.
The very first thing you'll hear when you listen to Lie Lover Lie by The Blood Arm is the sound of singer Nathanial Fregoso yelping "I lay down some fucking hits." Thing is, it might just be the truest statement you hear all year.
Now buy Lie Lover Lie by The Blood Arm at Amazon
[story by Stuart Heritage]