These days you can't move for spikily angular bands with asymmetrical haircuts and skinny suits, can you? It's bloody annoying – we literally tripped over the bassist from the Automatic on the way to buy some milk this morning.
And, to be honest, most of these bands are so tediously identical that half of their mothers couldn't pick them out of a copy of the NME. What we need is a band who manages to nail the basics – spiky guitars, danceability, yelped vocals – and then write an album full of tunes bigger than a fleet of jumbo jets. Surely they'd instantly make every other opportunist indie band around completely redundant, wouldn't they? Well, The Sunshine Underground is that band, Raise The Alarm is that album and Fearne Cotton's due to start sniffing round them for boyfriend material any second now.
Raise The Alarm by The Sunshine Underground is one of those rare things – a derivative album that manages to add enough quirks and flourishes to make it entirely new sounding. In Raise The Alarm, The Sunshine Underground have managed to rip off all kinds of bands – like Public Image, The Happy Mondays, The Rapture – and make it sound so contemporary that you can't help being utterly amazed by it.
By now you'll be completely familiar with the enormous robot disco funk juggernaut that is Put You In Your Place. Even after weeks and weeks of repeated listening, we still aren't tiring of its bone-crushing insistence. Put You In Your Place is still the most immediate thing that The Sunshine Underground have put on Raise The Alarm, but it doesn't reveal the big picture about the band by any means. Raise The Alarm opener Wake Up proves that The Sunshine Underground can do 'atmospheric' just as well as anyone, as its Jah Wobble bassline and spidery guitar will attest to. And it's a danceable bastard too.
Dead Scene builds on this, and The Sunshine Underground squeeze in a couple of cheeky v signs at the older bands that they're so clearly straining at the leash to streak past, "I hear you wrote the rulebook… you say you've seen this all before," it goes, amidst a groove so tight you could trampoline on it. Then there's Commercial Breakdown, which comes complete with a genuine skyscraper of a tune that could rouse the dead.
For a debut, Raise The Alarm by The Sunshine Underground is phenomenal. Phenomenal but not quite perfect. When The Sunshine Underground let their focus slip, on songs like The Way It Is and Someone's Always Getting In The Way, the result is an indistinct mess. But they're minor quibbles, and can be forgotten in an instant in an album that contains moments like the final few seconds of album closer Raise The Alarm, which is a genuine thrill to listen to.
If The Sunshine Underground can pull off an album of the staggering quality as Raise The Alarm as a debut, we're expecting some giant, genre-busting things from The Sunshine Underground in the future.
Now Buy Raise The Alarm by The Sunshine Underground from Amazon
[story by Stuart Heritage]
¡Th0m! says
Dude finally! You are the first reviewer who thinks the exact same way about this amazing album as I do =D
It’s so underrated; I love every track, Borders & Commercial Breakdown are two of the best songs I know, Raise The Alarm is an awesome climax and everything in between is great as well. And so are their live-shows, even more fantastic than the album!
I literally can’t wait for their successor! :O
webdesign says
awesome album!!