Slow Club
Paradise
There is a real mixture of styles on Slow Club’s second record. Opener ‘Two Lost Cousins’ is a piano-led off-kilter stomp. ‘Hackney Marsh’ is a beautifully sparse, early Bon Iver style master class in how to generate huge amounts of power armed with just a good song and an acoustic guitar. ‘Beginners’ sounds like an angry 80s pop song, and ‘The Dog’ is surely stolen from the debut Two Door Cinema Club album, somehow smuggled onto this without anyone noticing. Every track here is excellent, and every track is different from the rest. All made more impressive by the fact that Slow Club are only two people. The band have been criticised as being ‘twee’ in the press. That’s true, but only to the extent that ‘tweeness’ can be viewed as a virtue, and, in truth, this is too eclectic to really be considered twee. In any event, when the lamenting electronica of closer and title track, ‘Paradise’, fades, my initial thought – some four months since I bought the record – is always to start it again. Which can only be a good sign. The first record on this list that I’d say was a must have.
Paradise
There is a real mixture of styles on Slow Club’s second record. Opener ‘Two Lost Cousins’ is a piano-led off-kilter stomp. ‘Hackney Marsh’ is a beautifully sparse, early Bon Iver style master class in how to generate huge amounts of power armed with just a good song and an acoustic guitar. ‘Beginners’ sounds like an angry 80s pop song, and ‘The Dog’ is surely stolen from the debut Two Door Cinema Club album, somehow smuggled onto this without anyone noticing. Every track here is excellent, and every track is different from the rest. All made more impressive by the fact that Slow Club are only two people. The band have been criticised as being ‘twee’ in the press. That’s true, but only to the extent that ‘tweeness’ can be viewed as a virtue, and, in truth, this is too eclectic to really be considered twee. In any event, when the lamenting electronica of closer and title track, ‘Paradise’, fades, my initial thought – some four months since I bought the record – is always to start it again. Which can only be a good sign. The first record on this list that I’d say was a must have.
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