HATCHAM SOCIAL - About Girls

The Kidd brothers return, after the fine debut “You Dig The Tunnell, I’ll Hide The Soil” from 2009, with a second album poised across thirteen new songs that, starting from the title itself, flutter delicately between erotic nostalgia and assorted autobiography. The band's compositional signature remains faithful to itself and doesn't risk any pyrotechnic evolution, confirming its blatant echoes of English indie-rock stamped Creation Records and reiterating a punk-wave, song-driven attitude with no particular radical-chic ambitions, which neither disappoints nor thrills.

With a very good voice and dynamic, nimble guitar work to rely on, Hatcham Social line up a sequence of enjoyable episodes of quintessential Brit-rock, rippled here and there with a more vintage touch. Listening to tracks like “All Summer Long”, “Stay Together”, “Invention Of Air” (a potential anthem), “Would You”, all of them blessed with instantly catchy, ultra-quick-grab choruses, you notice obvious analogies with the by-now distant songbook of Libertines (and of stylistically related bands such as Razorlight or Cribs, who returned this year with a remarkable album that was largely ignored).

Among the most successful results, always along the same lines, are also “Lois Lane”, “Like An Animal” (almost garage), “Little Savage” (among the best), all of which show a noticeable refinement in the band's compositional craft.

With the media big-band of Arctic Monkeys now spent, the fate of the more, so to speak, “traditional” English indie-rock bands today risks seriously remaining trapped in a limbo with no way out toward visibility. The proposal of a band like Hatcham Social thus runs the risk of becoming, quite paradoxically, esoteric material for a handful of passionate archaeologists of contemporary sound. In any case, as mentioned, the band holds its own with dignity and elegantly dodges the coarseness (at times trivial) of more rudimentary bands like Spector, Two Door Cinema Club or Tribes.

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08/10/2012