Britain famously is the island where you can take the person out of the place but never the place out of the person; calling one of your songs Leave The South when you come from Manchester is an act of provocation that’s surely bound to throw up some fairly polarized reactions.
In fact, Blanketman – singer Adam Hopper, Jeremy Torralvo Godoy on bass, Ellie-Rose Elliott on drums and guitarist Daniel Hand – use the tune not as the pretext for a good old fashioned scrap as much as talking about the impact of isolation from the familiar, whilst also having enough smarts to diffuse the haters with some ramshackle charm and harmonies anyone can dig.
Being that kind of band from that neck of the woods is hardly what the suits call a USP; it feels like if taking a reckless drive around the M60 you couldn’t fail but to crash into a van with one of them in.
Happily, there’s a complicated twist to a lot of what makes up the National Trust’s seven songs, from nudge winks to the early post punkers on Harold – which lyrically explores night terrors and being trapped with yourself – to the pithy, slightly eccentric rumble of Beach Body as it takes in the unflattering optics of the middle-aged Brit abroad.
All music sounds like something else, so you might as well sound like good music, the angular melodies and wit here reminiscent of Sports Team or the quirk-filled abstraction of Kiwi Jr., especially the latter on Dogs Die In Hot Cars and the title-track’s rush of perfectly executed indie brio. Closer The Tie, meanwhile, has in it just the vaguest suggestion of The Fall at their Brix-est.
Poking fun at Speedo-clad Jeffs and admitting the north ‘can be quite grey’ might seem a bit unconventionally direct for these irony drenched times, but for Blanketman pop wins versus cool, their approach, it’s confidently reckoned, ‘sharper, more sardonic…than many of their more po-faced peers’.
That sounds like more fighting talk where we come from, but who needs the aggro? It’s the disunited kingdom after all, so sit back with this and listen to the rain pour instead.
