Well, this for a start: “Shout Out, but don’t make a sound”. Thus runs the chorus of a mid-album indie-pop palate cleanser by local trio Black Hats, and the line encapsulates the band’s spirited pugilism but also suggests, at least to this listener, that there’s not a lot going on between the ears.
‘Shout Out’ happens to be my favourite tune on the record, largely due to Nick Breakspear’s shinily melancholic guitar picking, and the drowsy, late-summer groove created by bassist Budd and drummer Mark (who is also an excellent backing singer). The song is not typical of the album, being significantly slower and more indebted to Oasis and Stereophonics than the rest, which doff their hat more towards The Jam, The Clash and The Buzzcocks.
More representative is opener ‘Big Guns’, a strong example of exuberant garage-rock, the song kept jogging along by a cheerfully relentless cow-bell and given a bit of rhythmical interest by some cautious syncopations in the chorus. Like many of the songs on this record, there’s not a lot to remember, but it’s fun while it lasts. Moving on, we have the Friday evening anthem “We Go Out”, which feels very dated, not least because of the intro, which sounds like it’s been lifted fairly comprehensively from Supergrass’s ‘Richard III’. In addition the subject matter seems infused with the spirit of Nuts, Loaded and FHM, all of which now have a readership on a par with Bob Dole’s presidential election address. Leave this stuff in the Nineties, lads.
A bit more sophisticated is ‘Callow Man’, an affectionate retrospective on Breakspear’s teenage years, and featuring strong three-part harmony singing and the welcome addition of extra instrumental colour to the usual bass-drums-guitar; in this case it comes in the form of some subtle xylophone at the beginning. This instrument also shows up in the intriguing ‘Made of Paper’, which also features a layer of Andy Summers-like guitar picking in addition to the usual power chords and indie jangles. The chorus, insistent, but more tuneful than usual, is rather good- fans of The Police will recognise a distant kinship with ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’.
‘What’s Not to Understand?’ is evidence of a good, tight, purposeful indie-rock band, who have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the classic rock and punk of the past thirty years, but in the main, the album remains a testament to the past, rather than the forging of anything very new or interesting. They will always be worth hearing live, due to Breakspear’s wholehearted stage charisma, but the suspicion remains that the world may have moved on. They may be Shouting Out, but is anybody listening?