November 9, 2007

Glasvegas

Daddy’s Gone/Flowers And Football Tops

Photo Gallery: Glasvegas
Photo: Pieter M Van Hattem

“Remember times when you put me on your shoulders?/How I wished it was forever you would hold us… You could have had it all/You, me and mum, you know anything was possible”. The number of love songs written about girls, boys, cars, drugs, guns, hometowns or pet rats number in their billions, but the love between a young man and his absent dad is rarely visited – it’s the Love That Dare Not Croon Its Name. Which makes this second single from Glasvegas (showstoppers from Glasgow, geddit?) all the more touching, as singer James Allan, in the broadest Scots brogue you can squeeze down a microphone, lays bare the teenage torments of the fatherless child: “I won’t be the lonely one/Sitting on my own and sad/A 50-year-old reminiscing what I had/forget your dad, he’s gone”. No, sniff, it’s nothing, I’ve just got something in my eye…

How great are Glasvegas and their romantic C86-styled indie pop? For one thing, they sound like an amalgamation of every great single Creation record released pre-Oasis (The Jesus And Mary Chain, The Pastels and St Etienne), while at the same time managing to tap into the disparate brilliance of the likes of Elvis Presley, early-Beatles, The Stone Roses, Orange Juice, Roy Orbison, The Velvet Underground and The Proclaimers (don’t laugh. Only dorks don’t like The Proclaimers).
In doing so, they cram in an A-Z of rock’n’roll cool into two four-minute-plus slabs of shamble pop (the best being the A-side, complete with cutesy “ooo-ooohs”), which – from their Spector-indebted sound, to their use of ’50s-style mics, to the cool-ass, stand-up girl drummer – suggest they’re a band who might actually join the illustrious company mentioned earlier. Whatever. Right now, this is single of the year. No question.

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