Listening to the new Echo Boomer EP, I have the same feelings as Mark Corrigan watching gay porn.
I realise this assertion may need a little clarification for those unfortunates who haven’t seen all episodes of Channel Four’s Peep Show. OK, the situation is that David Mitchell’s wonderfully fogeyish middle manager has developed a professional crush on his boss, the hyperactively high-achieving Johnston, and rents a DVD of the previously-mentioned genre in order to test out his sexual orientation. The first moments, depicting tastefully bronzed pectorals and rippling oiled biceps lead Mark to exclaim, “ Actually, this is all right… excellent toning…nothing scary here… a little friendly banter in the gym….”. However as the kecks come off, the experiment is abruptly ended: “Woahh. A little too rich for me”.
And that’s pretty much how I feel about ‘You Are’. Growing up hating the music of the Eighties, I and my mates would take refuge from Kajagoogoo, Level 42, Howard Jones and all the rest of those talentless, stupid-haired dickheads by immersing ourselves in seventies Prog, electric Dylan, Eskimo nose-fluting, pretty much anything that wasn’t in the charts. And so eighties revivalists are as welcome to this reviewer as the proverbial jobey in a swimming pool.
And yet, and yet, it starts really well. There are moments, even minutes, when I can tell myself there is nothing scary here. Jonny Race sounds an awful lot like Bono, but the former singer-turned-ethicist sold quite a lot of records, some of them not bad. ‘The Circle’ is tense, well-grooved stadium rock, beginning as economically as a good mid-period U2 single and developing into danceable Franz Ferdinand disco, complete with excellent lead guitar hook. Sam Race’s keyboards are subtle and sly, even conning us that there’s a cello dug in there somewhere. The rhythm section of Paul Wilson and Pete Oliver is tiny-sounding but secure.
But it gets a little too rich for me on ‘Learning to Lie’, which is dominated by the sort of deservedly-obsolete Eighties synths you used to hear on the test card preceding ‘Programmes for Schools and Colleges’ on Tuesday mornings, when what you really wanted was the hours to tick by into Bagpuss or Mister Benn. Awful. Too awful. Oh, and there’s a breakneck crap-rock guitar solo at the end. As Jarvis Cocker might have commented, this is hardcore.
You Are (The One) (Why the Parentheses?) weds the gorilla-drumming of Phil Collins to some more hideously un-ironic synthesiser hoots, whose unholy union should have brought the church ceiling crashing down on bride and groom, if there were any divine justice on this earth. It’s a bit of a shame as Race’s vocal melodies and tone are quite easy on the ear. We don’t have so many good vocalists in Oxford that we can afford to see this one waste his talent on cheesy throwbacks to what was a grim, charmless and heartless period for pop music. He needs to tell his brother to ditch the Bontempis, listen to some Grizzly Bear if he wants to learn how to deploy old keyboards effectively, and write some new songs that sound like they vaguely come from this century, rather than the worst decade of the last.