As the leading lights behind Liverpool's legendary 'Bandwagon' night at the great city's Zanzibar Club, THE BANDITS' reputation precedes, as does their increasing confidence as a singles band, with both "Take It And Run" and "2Step Rock" recently claiming significant chart action.
And, to be fair, they can cut it. "And They Walked Away" is a pretty good debut album, with tunefulness, quirky 'Cosmic Scouse' humour intact and - on tracks like the mournful "Standing Under" - the seemingly obligatory 'Pool nautical imagery all present and correct.
So, your reviewer is basically here to praise The Bandits, not put a price on their heads. However, he should first sound a word of warning about these hombres' achievements here, and especially the fact that "And They Walked Away" does not enter the race in terms of the sonic invention their neighbours The Coral (and The Zutons, for that matter) seem to able to conjure at will. I mean, however good songs like "Numbers" and "Hung Or Hunger" are (and they are decent enough), there's nothing here that breathlessly excites the way things like "Skeleton Key" or "Bill McCai" do, and - despite some of the Eastern textures incorporated, The Bandits have yet to create something as remarkable as The La's Brechtian "Freedom Song."
All that said, I'm not entirely predisposed to hold back on the superlatives, either. There's plenty of cool stuff here, after all. For instance, the album kicks off persuasively with the stupidly catchy rumble of "2Step Rock" (boasting an ace vocal from John Robinson) and the cut and thrust of "The Warning", which features some stinging guitar work from Richie Bandit. Both are stirling statements of intent and are later rivalled by the contemplative "Wake Them Up At Sunrise", the irrepressible Mersey country of "Take It And Run" with its' wafting Dylan-ish harmonica and the Egyptian rockabilly (with melancholy lullaby sub-section) that is "Use Your Voice."
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Stir in the weird legalese and dub undercurrents of "Chaos In The Courtroom", the slow-burning climax of "How Can You Believe" and the forceful "On My Way" and it's blatantly obvious that The Bandits' recipe relishes deviation from the norm, with the band successfully incorporating some pleasantly unlikely source material into "And They Walked Away". The end result is a consistently good, sometimes very good album that will no doubt sustain the lads for a good while, but the nagging doubts that they will surpass this remain. Time will tell, but for now this is a joyfully listenable introduction.
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