There are two ways to play the piano, basically. You can have lessons and go down the grandiose "Pianos in Rock" route favoured by the likes of Coldplay and Keane, or you can pick it up yourself and plink along in a fast, jazzy kind of manner. Electrelane prefer the latter approach, and so do I.
In fact, Electrelane do everything the way I like it - A disciplined guitar that rarely strays from its given path, bass and drums that hammer it out nice and steady, and a Steve Albini production that sounds absolutely basic. Of course you can bet your life he put an awful lot of effort into getting it to sound that way. To top it off, the whole thing is played with a real punk-rock-hammer-it-out aesthetic. Now If Tesco had a "No-frills" music section, this record would be right up there at the front.
There is a problem with no-frills products, however, which is that they tend to skimp on the most vital ingredient. And so it proves with Electrelane - a large number of the songs on this album are instrumentals, which I don't mind too much because they sound great like that. The thing is though, when they do supply vocals, like on the recent single "Two for Joy", the whole thing takes off onto another, more beautiful plane altogether. Singer and pianist Verity Susman's voice is indeed pure joy to listen to, again without doing anything too elaborate. And elsewhere, the cover of Leonard Cohen's "The Partisan" is great too. I just wish there were more of them.
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Elsewhere amongst the instrumentals there are some cool sounds, like the Parisian harmonium on "Eight Steps" and the train noises on "Gone Darker", which were apparantly inspired by a gig in Tucson where the band had to play with the doors open because of the heat..
I really like this album and I wish I was going to be able to see them on their brief UK dates, because I reckon live they'll be awesome. I just wish they sang more..
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