Album Review: FEET – What’s Inside Is More Than Just Ham


Whats Inside Is More Than Just Ham



FEET. What to say about them? Amiable lunatics? Coventry crooners causing havoc quaffing Carling? Brit pop-punk revivalists writing songs about half naked sunbathers?

Happily, they’re all of those things. Formed at university in the West Midlands city which never seems to have much luck going its way, the quintet have a shot at putting it back on the map – one admittedly that titling their debut album after a song telling a love story from the point of view of a hot dog may or may not assist. It probably helps that it’s brilliant. The album that is, not the hot dog.

Consider for instance what could make a record great. Killer songs? Great melodies? Lyrics about shooting stars, being burgled, mistakenly putting diesel purifier in your kettle? Check, check, check, check and bloody check, mate. What’s Inside Is More Than Just Ham doesn’t really care if all these parts join together, but its slightly haphazard nature masks a savvy take on high jinks for the delectation of anyone with ears.

Part of the appeal is this pretence of being off the cuff, but from the first slow-fast-slow gyrations of opener Good Richard’s Crash Landing there’s a wicked groove going on, Ad Blue (the song about the diesel), Axe Man (about the burglary) and Outer Rim (the one about the celestial event) each being breezy, groovy and manic respectively.

Character isn’t made from just showing up and hitting the instruments in time though: singer George Haverson has a multi-purpose drawl that lends everything a slickly careless sheen, from the slovenly lilt of Dog Walking to closer Wiggy Pop’s mutant country and western, each tune at a slightly oblique angle to the next without presenting any radical kind of departure from the whole.

As well as how to heroically self-sabotage, Haverson & co. also know their way around an earworm: there was a strong chance there would be few songs more sung in beer gardens than the endlessly hook laden English Weather this summer, were it not for the fact that it was released as a single in February.

Perhaps this deliberate spurning of opportunities is due to the belief that your talent will take you places, as was the case for the band when they ended up in the Hampshire old people’s resort so laconically celebrated in Chalet 47. But the modern disposability, both of feelings and attitudes, they ride so well is best skewered on Petty Thieving’s breakneck punk, the joy of taking things you don’t need being one of the present’s most self-absorbed distractions.

And their general attitude to life? ‘I’m just taking the piss’, quips Haverson on What’s Inside Is More Than Just Ham’s closer, as if the chaos that follows them is just natural.

Many a great band before them has felt the same and still made people love them and soon you, like they, will understand that FEET make fantastic, razor sharp music that will have you dancing so much you’ll need a good chiropractor afterwards.



8/10

(Andy Peterson)


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