LIFE create a big stage for a small town world.
They mess you up, your mum and your dad, but not sometimes as much as where you’re from.
Philip Larkin had spent half his time on earth in Hull when he died there in 1985, but the four respective members of LIFE have been permanent residents, give or take, and that means any messed-upness is turned up to 11.
A place with pubs not bars, wall to wall Vape Zones and unforgiving concrete, anybody who’s lived on either side of the river for a while will tell you it’s a straight-talking paradise at below sea level.
In 2019, the success of their second album A Picture Of Good Health threatened to take LIFE away from all of that, an attempted kidnap by some rock star shit, but in a predictably Hull way the first global pandemic in over 100 years grounded everyone and, like a perverse boomerang, they hurtled back down the A63.
The SNAFU left everyone writing about what they knew by default, but for singer Mez Green this became a purpose as opposed to an unhappy consequence. North East Coastal Town is, he says, ‘our love letter to the city’. ‘An ode to kinship and relationship with its musical and lyrical spine picking out themes of love, desire, beauty, horror, chaos, pride and most importantly the sense of belonging.’
London Calling eat your heart out, but a couple of listens confirm it was a seriously taken mission. A Picture Of Good Health felt like it was in a hurry to be somewhere, a hundred miles an hour of therapy, but that sense of world-as-a-blur is gone here, replaced instead by daily existence in unforgiving close-up.
Opener Friends Without Names feels like a case for acceptance and a new beginning, demonstrating a patience LIFE haven’t always chosen, with lyrics embracing the meat hooks of place which hold us back, its post-punk throb is the sound of the roundabout in our heads of people, boredom, and flickering glimpses of joy a thing allows us.
As in the past, for ideas Green continues to empty his mind out onto the table like some do their pockets, sifting through the detritus for inspiration. Big Moon Lake deals with consumerism and short-term fixes as a bulwark against depression (sample lyric: ‘I think I’m spending far too much on fairly average takeaways’) whilst the barrelling Self Portrait chows down on himself, deep skewering ego and its easy overspill into pitiless vanity.
Like a night out in town, things get weird as control slips; Shipping Forecast jolts alarmingly like falling off a kerb after taking that stranger’s pill you knew you shouldn’t have, but the studded glam of Incomplete is a different shade of brown, a gyrating brute of a track that doesn’t want any of your tea and fucking sympathy, thanks mate.
Coming down happens too: Duck Egg Blue shivers, bouncing along the bottom with a weariness that begs a hug, whilst the laconic closer All You Are is a love song served up in a chipped mug.
Any local will tell you that Hull isn’t on the coast, but then again North East Coastal Town isn’t the in-joke it first seems. With it you aren’t gate-crashing somebody’s party, just getting a guided tour round four people’s minds.
Our existence is so pasteurised now that most of the time you could literally be anywhere, whatever you’re doing, but LIFE still want the memories they make to be more than two dimensional, postable, likeable, flat and somehow dead.
Accordingly this is a local record, but for national people.
