The Zutons - Who Killed The Zutons?
The Band
Russell Pritchard
Sean Payne
Boyan Chowdhury
David McCabe
Abi Harding
Band Information
This is The Zutons' debut album following a couple of unconnected singles released last year. They have recently been nominated for the prestigious UK award the Mercury Prize and are rock magazines' and alternative music channels' new favourite band.
Review
On first buying the album I was expecting a kind of concept album, as the album title combined with a CD booklet containing heavily stylized cartoons of death and destruction makes you think this will be some sort of apocalyptic work a la Muse. But in fact, excluding a few tracks, it is nothing of the sort.
The album has a very strong opening, the first three tracks of
Zuton Fever,
Pressure Point and
You Will You Won't are highlights of the whole album. This works well for the band as unknowns, the listener becomes drawn in very quickly and interested in what else they are going to do during the course of the relatively short 40 minutes on this record.
Pressure Point in particular is a great song, a really infectious pop melody plus some interesting backing vocals and panicked lyrics make a track that is both very radio-friendly and interesting to listen to. These songs are the fast, energetic parts of the record, and after this the band moves into different territory.
Their slower, calmer songs -
Confusion and
Not A Lot To Do are a little weaker in my opinion but on an album where every song has something in its favour they aren't bad at all.
Dirty Dancehall and
Nightmare Part Two deal with quite disturbing material , talking about death in a pretty graphic manner, bizarrely set to the same catchy pop tunes.
Nightmare Part Two is a little too off-the-wall for my tastes, but
Dirty Dancehall is very enjoyable as a kind of warped social commentary "this is just a night in the City of Culture, but everyone's whacked and looks like vultures".
The stand-out track of this album has to be
Remember Me - played a lot on the radio for some time now it is fiendishly catchy and the band's songwriting at its best. The song's lyrics are a treat, dealing with that ever-present problem of your friend ditching you for their new boyfriend/girlfriend in a very direct, clear way that makes for interesting listening.
The singer's voice is nothing exceptional on this, but it works perfectly well with the material. There are some really strange guitar sounds on some of the tracks that perhaps are a little too jolting and the musicianship is not amazing, although they are clearly all perfectly competent. Another problem with the record is that it is all very obviously influenced writing, each song sounds like something else and there is nothing very ground-breaking here. However, the band does not pretend that their songs are anything more than what they are, so I feel that their derived sound is not very relevant to how much you will enjoy the album.
The band are great songwriters with a knack for brilliant tunes and reasonably original lyrics that make this album worthy of its Mercury Prize nomination and quite possibly one of the main contenders. If you're looking for something that is energising, entertaining and not too hard on the ear then this is a perfect album, however if you are looking for something that will redefine a genre of music then I'm afraid you will have to keep looking, for this is not it.
