Friday 30 September 2011
Candid Online
Alice are young and very talented, they are a six piece band, aged eighteen to twenty who play twenty three instruments and take time out to work in warehouses and supermarkets. They have been played on BBC Radio 1’s Introducing, likened to Sonic Youth and favourited by Radio Reverb who call them, “the most exciting band to come out of Brighton for a long time.” As entertaining as committing mass genocide backstage at T4 on the Beach and as unsettling as being surrounded by bloodied corpses, Alice are causing a stir.
For such a young bandSinnerman is a surprisingly experimental debut album, persistently reassessing its sound throughout, making false starts and ‘wrong’ turns in each track. Several of Alice’s members are classically trained; this is a band that is aware of how to make music but makes a conscious effort to avert the guidelines. The full sound and the multi-instrument talents of the six members create such a diverse range of sounds that set Alice apart from their contemporaries. Rather than settling into any specific genre, Sinnerman takes musical elements and influence from a variety of artists and epochs, fusing them together in a bafflingly effective crescendo of modernity and world weary lyrics that belie the band’s average age and dissipates the pre-occupation of pigeon-holing new artists.
Sinnerman is a lyrical album about being young and lost and although it is raucous and gritty it also holds a poignant quality, with the title track Sinnerman a sorrowful punctuation mark amongst the rest of the heavier tracks. The acoustic guitar, the soft piano and the vocals, which are reminiscent of a heart-broken Nick Drake, come as a relief to the relentlessness of the album but are by no account any less arresting. Dominic Pearson shows the extent of his talent as a vocalist and the track acts as a direct contrast to the hidden lyrics and muddy effected voice on some of the other tracks. The starkness of emotion in Pearson’s voice proves Sinnerman as a worthy title track.
Elsewhere, Chosen One is a bionic version of a
melancholy songwriter’s resistance to conventionality, with Pearson screaming “you’ll see me coming baby, I’m the fucking prize” in a song that seems sardonic and effortless; a raw show of insecurity. However, the stand-out track from the album has to be Drawing Straws, an energetic electric-slide-guitar Faustian trawl through repetitive nihilism, Pearson sings “I keep drawing straws with the devil.” Dan Baboulene’s bass line rips through the verses, whilst the horns line at the chorus delivers another surprising twist. Which is exactly what this band is: unexpected, surprising, startling and in places enigmatically painful. Sinnerman is the embodiment of a visible evolution of sound that promises deep, dark yet conversely melodic and catchy twists and turns for the future of this exciting band.
Alice will be releasing their new album National Service in October this year. You can buy Sinnerman on iTunes and Amazon.
Alice Ash
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