INDELICATES - American Demo

A roughly romantic band like Indelicates could only have been born for sentimental reasons.

Julia Clark-Lowes and Simon Clayton met at a poetry slam in Brighton, which he went on to win. It was 2005, and that encounter, along with a host of shared interests, bonded them for good. Her decision seemed like an incredible gamble at the time: a passionate photographer, documentary-maker, but above all singer and musician, she chose to leave the girl group she had helped found, The Pipettes, just a step away from their debut record and the resounding commercial success that followed. The idea was to devote herself fully to a new, more intriguing project with the partner she had just met, a figure already very active on the local arts scene as a writer of musicals and Brechtian-flavoured cabaret. With hindsight, at least for future listeners, it's safe to say it wasn't the wrong choice.

Having taken on the fictitious surname Indelicate, Julia and Simon set to work hard to find the right stylistic common ground between their two personalities, discovering fertile territory for their shared passion for music in protest folk songs, but also in twee leanings and a love for more committed new wave. The result of this turbulent, embryonic phase for Indelicates was a batch of self-recorded demos, which they then made available to fans as free downloads on their website. The experience might never have gone beyond this first scrappy adventure, had Simon and Julia not possessed that innate talent for writing intelligent songs and performing them with just the right character. Beyond the still-amateurish execution, they already had several interesting arrows in their quiver, chief among them an awareness of the underlying lie behind the now-sterile label of indie, a genre that likes to think of itself as removed from the market logic of commercial pop but which actually functions in exactly the same way, just with slightly more refined semantic sweeteners. And, following that line of thought, an all-round bitterness aimed above all at the victims of this worn-out, perverse mechanism: the younger generations stripped of their role as listeners with their own critical conscience, destined instead to become passive, bored, soulless consumers.

This is the meaning behind venomous tracks like "The Last Significant Statement To Be Made in Rock'n'roll", "Fun is for the Feeble Minded", "We Hate the Kids", among the most sincere and least trite songs Indelicates have ever written. No kinder treatment is reserved for creatives, in a scene where there's nothing left to invent ("New Art For The People"), nor for the puppet-masters of showbiz, peddlers of operetta-style rebellion and rather greedy carnival barkers endlessly reiterating the tireless, corrosive idolatry of pop stars. That's roughly the hidden allusion behind a caustic but never cynical invective like "Waiting For Pete Doherty To Die", a track that was regularly misunderstood and, perhaps partly for that reason, left off the list of releasable songs.

The provocation would pay off. Encouraged by the growing positive response within their small niche, Simon and Julia built a proper band around the project and recorded this debut album. Frayed and emotional, dishevelled and proud, naive and just a touch snobbish, "American Demo" presents its authors exactly as they are: different, and proud to be so, gifted at writing instantly catchy songs and, above all, blessed with that literary streak that finally elevates the lyrics to an element as decisive as the music itself. This is a provocative yet honest album (never ingratiating), wicked and crystal clear, decadent and corrosive with a marked taste for humour, stuffed with more or less erudite references and steeped in a retro romantic aura (with obvious debts to Morrissey, among others), which burst onto the stagnant English scene of those years, hinting at a still largely unexplored stylistic path.

It's not often you come across an outfit with two expressive personalities so distinct and compelling, easily identifiable in the splendid voices of Simon and Julia as well as in their respective signature instruments, guitar and piano, the unquestioned co-stars of the album. The Indelicates make the most of this dual polarity's potential, insisting stubbornly on the happy contrast between the two souls, turning that dialectic into their personal trademark: sulkiness and grace, boozy spleen and sophisticated delicacy, electricity and pastel tones are the aesthetic extremes that meet and complement each other harmoniously, elevating every track on "American Demo" to the rank of gems, as troubling as they are moving. Several of the Brighton band's earlier songs are re-presented here with due emphasis on sound quality: needless to say, they gain considerably in depth and impact, especially the more muscular and noisy ones, but the revisiting also strengthens the moments with a more pronounced (and welcome) pop inclination, such as "Sixteen" and "Julia, We Don't Live In The '60s". Adding the previously unreleased "Stars" to the list, splendidly bittersweet in its reflections on a love made of overpowering and brutality, these are the moments in which Julia gets to unleash all her many-sided talent and that weary but never false grace.

In the same vein, "Burn All The Photographs" (one of Clark-Lowes's most intense performances) and the remarkable cover of "A New England" are unfortunately left off the tracklist, as is the aforementioned divertissement about the former frontman of the Libertines. But there's plenty more thrown into the mix. A sharp new boutade placed with great skill, like "Heroin", for instance, or the fierce disenchantment of the frontal attack on the political (but above all cultural) subservience the English pay to that "Godless America" which remains the implicit point of reference for every analysis; and then the menacing political currency allegorized behind the allusive melancholic mood of "Unity Mitford", where the tale of a woman's self-destructive madness over her infatuation with Hitler becomes a pretext to talk about neo-fascist resurgences and the renewed intolerance of our times; or the cutting essentialism in the teachings of a great master – duly credited, as ever – like Billy Bragg, whose polemical vitriol is softened on "Better To Know" into a handsome pop-rock that brings to mind the stinging, disillusioned sound of early Hefner or the Scottish band Ballboy.

And finally, a gem like "If Jeff Buckley Had Lived", reserved for everyone who, like them, truly loved the son of Tim but also for those who, as expected, would go on to accuse them of jackal-like opportunism. A bitter, unconsoling song that aims to reclaim the artist's human side from a demythologizing perspective: the most intense Simon on "American Demo" fires without restraint at the music press and record industry that turned Buckley into a victim to be deified, an empty simulacrum of cursed clichés, a cult object to be exploited to the hilt.

This is the (enormous) amount of material on the table in a debut that would be reductive to simply call surprising.

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03/04/2014