LITTLE MAN TATE - About What You Know

Little Man Tate have everything against them. First of all, they're an English rock band in the most classic and traditional sense of the term, one of those typical products made of harmless guitar rock that the British music industry churns out at a dizzying rate for the joy of ever-hungrier magazines, a band that plays yet another rehash of old, dusty flea-market trinkets branded Kinks, Who and Jam, resold at full price as if they were new. On top of that, as if that weren't enough, Little Man Tate carry the unforgivable aggravating factor of hailing from the ever-fertile Sheffield, which inevitably brings the comparison to their more famous townsmen Arctic Monkeys, and the equally inevitable sentence of being lumped in with the crowded ranks of also-rans who'd love to but can't.

But the beauty of it is that Little Man Tate know all this better than anyone else, which is why the manifesto song that opens their debut album gets ahead of the game and is titled "Man I Hate Your Band", half a pint of foaming mod guitars and a chorus that spirals in on itself, leaving little room for navel-gazing or smug intellectualism, and knowing exactly the right combination to unleash the brawling, furious hooligan curve buried inside all of us.

More than an album, this "About What You Know" feels like a sweaty, sticky PE lesson fuelled by beer and cigarettes. "Sexy Latin" and "European Lover" follow the path laid out by Oasis and Stereophonics, with extremely rudimentary melodic progressions and pleasingly punchy choruses that seem purpose-built to amplify the footballing apotheosis of drunk, roaring crowds. "This Must Be Love" and "House Party At Boothy's" raise, in a typically British tradition, a small poetic monument to the myth of Friday nights spent at the local pub, amid bursts of rough working-class pride washed down with beer and sexual aspirations that are often frustrated.

Of course, the toy often jams, and songs like "Court Report", "Little Big Man", "3 Day Rules" or "Who Invented These Lists?" don't really go much beyond the shallowness of a boozy anthem from some disreputable dive, borrowing a bit from Supergrass, a bit from the Cribs, and you have to wonder why on earth the tracklist doesn't include Little Man Tate's best-known song, namely "What? What You Got".

Maybe this kind of music really doesn't have a future anymore - in fact, to be precise, it hasn't had one for more than twenty years - and yet the notes of the closing diptych "This Girl Isn't My Girlfriend" and "Down On Marie" tell us the same old story of a band that one day found a guitar and believed they were inventing rock for the first time, and what can we do at this point except believe them, happy to have been pleasantly conned once again? After all, as the Art Brut adage candidly put it: "Formed a band, we formed a band, look at us, we formed a band!".

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19/04/2007