Sky Larkin - The Golden Spike
After releasing 2 singles on Leeds imprint Dance To The Radio (as all bands from Leeds worth their salt do) Sky Larkin got picked up by Wichita records who swiftly flew them to Seattle to work with producer John Goodmanson, whose CV impressively boasts Death Cab For Cutie and Sleater Kinney. The results are ‘The Golden Spike’.
Trapped in a bubble along with It Hugs Back and The Subways, all of whom also seem to inhabit a world apart from current musical trends, in fact they all seem to inhabit 1992. A world where lumberjack shirts, slightly greasy and tangled long hair, ripped jeans and tan corduroy jackets are the uniform de rigeur. There's no Shoreditch pretence to these guys, I'm pretty positive it will be a very cold day in hell before this threesome are caught with handle bar moustaches or day-glo leg warmers - in other words this is meat and two veg guitar music - no frills just straightforward 2.5 minute pop songs
This would not be too much of a complaint if it wasn't that there simply isn't enough substance to it, so it flows over you without really garnering a reaction, it’s all a bit, well, nice really. It also starts to just get a little too familiar and with just one idea all the way through it can't be helped. Taken individually each could be a Belly single from 1992 but altogether it just gets a bit too samey - same guitar sound, same vocal inflections, same song structures.
'Somersault' has a little bit of carnival sounding hammond injected and also a fuzzy bass sound, but this is a stand out, and displays more inventiveness and experimentation than the rest put together. As if to prove a point straight after 'Somersault' is 'Beeline' which could just be 'Fossil, I' played again, except she goes 'uh oh' rather than 'uh oh ay ayeeee'.
Then we get to their epic track, the behemoth, the giant, the sprawling 'One Of Two'. Clocking in at a full 3 whole minutes and 54 seconds, this is their 'Paranoid Android'! Incredibly, despite its short length it still manages to be boring! I've sat through an hour listening to someone discuss the finer points of Belgian politics without being as bored as this!
Clocking in at 36 mins ‘The Golden Spike’ is short but definitely not sharp or a shock, more soft and predictable. These songs carry about as much weight as a famine victim; they're not going to change the world, they're also not going to be filling Wembley Stadium in the next year or two. But despite this I can't help but have a little bit of a fondness for it. Maybe it's a nostalgia thing, maybe I long for that time that the only thing you could see through my knotted hair was acne, maybe it just reminds me of when I first discovered music of my own, whatever it is this simple, poppy, unadventurous (OK, dull) album is an enjoyable listen. In fact, I may go as far to say - it would make nice background music! (Oh, the horror; is there anything more insulting to a musician?)
Top Tracks: 'Somersault'
Released February 9th on Wichita