Demob Happy - The Grown-Ups Are Talking: Album Review

Artwork for the demob happy album the grown-ups are talking

4 stars hq

What makes Demob Happy’s new album is what happens when the British sensibility breaks through; the cynicism, the wit, the instinct to reach for Floyd or Bowie or Oasis.

Power Games opens Demob Happy‘s new album The Grown-Ups Are Talking like a bouncer.

With arms crossed, not budging, not giving anything away it thumps and stomps as much as Queens Of The Stone Age or Royal Blood, and it does its job – but like any good bouncer, it’s not really about what’s on the door.

It’s about what’s inside, and only the right people are getting a hint of that from out here. Because once you’re in, this is a very different room to the one advertised.

That room turns out to be a British band running Queens Of The Stone Age’s playbook, but with something sharper and more anxious underneath, closer to The Cooper Temple Clause’s paranoid attack than anything coming out of a Californian desert.

No Man Left Behind is where it clicks into focus. There’s the hypnotic bass-heavy groove that builds like a pressure system before blowing apart at the end but, where American stoner-rock tends toward the languorous, Demob Happy are always coiled, always about to turn on you.

Who Should I Say Is Calling? is the standout. It has everything (gear shifts, sarcasm, drama, a riff that hits like a brick), but what makes it genuinely surprising is a barely-there vocal feel that sends your brain somewhere unexpected: there’s a theatricality and a challenging grandeur bringing The Wall-era Pink Floyd to mind.

It’s not exactly that; it’s a light touch connection, and Demob Happy are not remotely trying to be Pink Floyd, but something in the delivery makes the connection impossible to shake.

When you make this connection, the preceding Don’t Hang Up (a brief, oddly beautiful left turn against the album’s general aggression) suddenly starts to feel like an accidental companion piece, a Great Gig in the Sky moment buried in the middle of a rock record that has absolutely no business containing one.

The Miracle Worker suite (split across two tracks, the division almost imperceptible) goes somewhere different again.

There’s Spacehog in there, and the way Spacehog filtered Bowie and Lou Reed into something more weightless and fun.

Think somewhere between Mungo City’ and Starside. It’s playful without being comedic, more atmospheric than aggressive, and it gives the album a different kind of depth than the riff-heavy tracks around it.

Then Something’s Gotta Give arrives and goes all Oasis-ish. It turns out Demob Happy have an inner Liam after all. Apparently every British rock band does, buried somewhere, lurking.

It works, hits all the right boxes, and the slight apathy in how it ends (considering the title) might even be deliberate.

The Grown-Ups Are Talking is a record that earns its QOTSA comparisons but refuses to be defined by them.

What makes it more interesting is what happens when the British sensibility breaks through; the cynicism, the wit, the instinct to reach for Floyd or Bowie or Oasis rather than more Californian touchstones.

Those aren’t detours from the album. They’re the point.