JOHNNY FOREIGNER
WAITED UP TIL IT WAS LIGHT
BEST BEFORE
Johnny Foreigner have made a mockery of the pressure that accompanies the high expectations of the music press. Waited Up Till It Was Light surpasses the promise of last year’s EP and flashes a big calling card to the Indie Big-Time. A re-education in 2nd wave Emo, each track is a giddily constructed puzzle-box made entirely of imagination and drive. They do play rough these dolls as Alexei Berrows, forever on emotional Def Con 5, feeds whirring guitar debris over frenetic chatterbox vocals whilst Kelly Southern terrorizes him with screeching interjections from behind her bass. All the while Junior makes sushi until the Matt Tong’s come a knockin’. Fraught but hopeful, doe-eyed yet savvy, its a Gondry-esque chase through young minds reaching for dreams unrealised and with its Technicolor splendour JF have travelled as far as possible in heart and mind from their hometown Birmingham. Namely mid-nineties Chicago with much of the trio’s freshness obtained by consuming the unique ethos of a scene so at odds with the prevailing trends of 2008’s faltering British musical landscape. Somewhat compromising the EP’s scrappier sensibilities, the production lends a more robust constitution, heaping majesty onto several forays into ethereal reflection and empowering the sludgy nebula on the likes of ‘Absolute Balance’.An album of Polaroid spontaneity, granular detail, winning humility and infectious punk belligerence.
8/10
DOWNLOAD: LEA ROOM, THE END AND EVERYTHING AFTER, ABSOLUTE BALANCE,
FOR FANS OF: AT THE DRIVE IN, CAP’N’JAZZ, BLOC PARTY
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