English Teacher are here on merit, at a career junction with branches leading off into everywhere.
When you think about it, isn’t pretty much everything about place? Whether it’s the place you’re physically in, or the one your head is at?
Dislocation between these states causes many of us to think differently, and whether that’s a good thing or not, something extraordinary can emerge from it.
First things first; you’re going to be hearing a lot about English Teacher, the quartet who first got together as students at the Leeds Conservatoire.
That doesn’t sound particularly street and, like The Last Dinner Party, a major label is in the background making sure that the hearing a lot thing isn’t by accident or the whim of a few smitten writers.
But recall should also be good – as the horribly contrived phrase goes – because English Teacher are unafraid of boxes, recognising them as the temporary accommodation that’s the music industry’s lingua franca, and because they make fucking great music, as this remarkable debut album only goes to underline.
Their rise might seem meteoric, but only to those who haven’t really been paying attention. Their first single R&B was released in 2021 and didn’t so much hint at promise as turn anyone exposed to its blocky, awkward post-punk into an instant evangelist.
English Teacher’s singer Lily Fontaine also used the lyrics to address stereotypes whilst giving the impression of a well-meaning stalker; it was a song for the age, loveable despite the messy execution.
A reworked, slicker (it’s all relative) version of R&B sits in the guts of This Could Be Texas, but oddly prompts a feeling of something beamed in from another world.
Perhaps it’s an attempt to mark the distance travelled, as even World’s Biggest Paving Slab, which in form is the closest equivalent, seems to be something further along through the evolutionary chain, its admirable peth spiked with flourishes of dream pop and shoegaze.
Take both of them together and they sound by turn much further away from the album’s heart, like refugees, but without being subject to the meaningless cruelty that infers in the real world.
Fontaine writes from the perspective of someone who is sharing for love, rather than soft power over her audience. On Mastermind Specialism she explores the act of not taking a decision as a decision of itself, the narrative arcing back to her own nomadic existence, the narrative one of serially breaking up with chunks of your own life.
There are other breakups too, such as the one exposed on the proggy motorik Nearly Daffodils, a broken-up song with a lamenting overtone: ‘You can lead water to the daffodils/but you can’t make them drink.’
Mostly though it’s easier to sit back and consider English Teacher’s ambition. Opener Albatross, employing a post-rock sense of space and rhythm, is steeped in either audience challenging confidence or bravery personified, the sort of risks that extend to I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’s somersaulting tempo, or the arty creak of Not Everybody Gets To Go To Space.
The actual fulfilment is delivered most specifically in two episodes, first via the piano-led title-track, a theatrical and wilfully complex scatter of prose and stood up phrasing, then on the closer Albert Road, a soulful paean to Fontaine’s home town on which the singer reveals a warmth that can only be found in true authenticity.
Like The Last Dinner Party, English Teacher are also here on merit, at a career junction with branches leading off into everywhere, including oblivion, but there’s enough talent and perspective here to make this the least likely option.
Inspired by many different times and places in the past, for English Teacher, This Could Be Texas signposts a hundred exciting, different futures.
