They don’t make ‘em like they used to do whenever they used to make ‘em, so it’s kind of fitting that Welsh four-piece Bandicoot are happily living in the era(s) when late period rock n’ roll was having some of its greatest moments.
To do so they’ve indebted their debut album to Britpop, Bowie and the Velvet Underground; it’s hard to see how from there you could go wrong.
It’s a lot further to the Big Apple than Camden from Swansea, but that’s all a matter of it being in the mind and the foursome show nerves of steel in being able to fly between coasts like they’re on a giant zip-wire.
In terms of that side of the Atlantic, they even go as far as to recreate the hollow cheeked energy and directness of the Meet Me In The Bathroom-era on Dark Too Long’s incendiary new wave strut, whilst the brass n’ skronk of Life & Death And Other Things satisfies like a Central Park shake.
Elsewhere, they keep their welcome in whatever hillside you happen to be at. The band’s splendidly named lead singer Rhys Underdown describes the backstory to Early In The Morning – supposedly five years under construction – as:
‘It begins in Swansea, with the serenity of watching a loved one sleeping..moves to a hotel in Aberystwyth, as a storm rages on the sea front, and then ends with departure, loss, heartbreak, where dreams and reality are confused and time seems to thunder through.’
Don’t make us think but make us think, you know? Simplicity is just as effective as a device, and elsewhere the shadow of fellow-countrymen and the kings of making hooks for the hirsute, Super Furry Animals, looms large, especially on the chiming, arcane pop of opener Siren and Mynedfeydd’s Rhodes-y bustle (it means hidden place, by the way).
And if you want to just set the controls of that wayback machine to full on 1995, closer There’s A Light In Everyone sounds like it should be the next last track of The Bends, if that makes any kind of twisted history sense.
However, with the future beckoning the quartet are going to have to ask themselves whether they’re going to be an outfit of words or lounge lizard action. Black After Dark’s title-track has soulful good intentions but rumbles along without really breaking stride, whilst Shadow Of A Former Time does a similar dance, sparking but never quite sizzling.
A good job then that they can take the essence of something as ancient like glam rock, sprinkle some magic powder on it, and create the groove-laden boogie of Fuzzy, but the one that will have your neighbours calling the Heddlu at three in the morning would be Train Station Mural, a jingle jangle-tastic Stone-Roses-With-A-Sax piece of absolute joy which, it has to be said, feels like it’s stowed away from another band’s album.
If they don’t make them like that anymore, how come Black After Dark is like this? The Bandicoot mantra of ‘play it and they will come’ seems ambitious at first, and to their credit Underdown & co. aren’t really here to tear down the walls – that’s somebody else’s curse.
From Manhattan to The Mumbles, it’s only rock n’ roll, but you’ll like it.
