THE VIEW - Hats Off To The Buskers

The latest British sensation comes from Dundee, already duly catechized by her majesty the NME. And after racking up magazine covers and sold-out shows across Albion, they're already setting their sights on conquering the rest of Europe. They're called The View, four barely-out-of-their-teens lads with thick fingers, inseparable from their battered guitars and a half-pint of cloudy beer. On no more than a superficial analysis, theirs is the same old, well-worn story of the great rock dream that cyclically renews its glories: deep provincial towns, weeks spent counting stars and mosquitoes, Sundays split between the pub, the stadium and a vague, undefined urge to escape, until a handful of three-chord rock songs crosses the astonished gaze of the mind, like the last train still running toward salvation (all of it already laid out in meticulous detail between the lines of Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road," more a musical genre than a song...).

This is probably what happened to The View, and their debut album plays nearly all its cards well, hoisting little generational anthems like "Same Jeans" or "Wasted Little DJs" and updating the evergreen lesson of Oasis, Supergrass and Libertines. "Superstar Tradesman," "Dundee In The Night" or "Grinds For Teen" reel off their brisk pop-rock patterns with real nimbleness and sharp little guitar scratches, and there's no shortage of more intimate, pensive acoustic ballads either, like "Face For The Radio" or "Gloria." If everything goes as it should, The View will become the Kooks of this new musical summer.

All in all, a story with a happy ending. And like all happy endings, a bit phony and often predictable. But this observation is perhaps entirely superfluous, since the public has already decreed this band's success, and deep down that's as it should be: let's leave younger listeners and fans the right to choose their own new musical idols...

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24/06/2007