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Album Review

The Wednesday Club
So Claw/ Sour Crow Cath'n'Dad Records

Article written by Ged M - Dec 29, 2011

The Wednesday Club: So Claw/ Sour Crow

Just as Guns N’ Roses released Use Your Illusion in two parts, so the Wednesday Club make a point of issuing two records, rather than a double album. Like Guns N’ Roses, it's hard to see the distinction but, unlike G N’ R, this is all part of the Wednesday Club's carefully crafted art-pop concept, the effect of which is multiplied when you also read the excellent playscript/ lyric sheet at their website. Best of all, the Wednesday Club's part-works are free to download, totalling 20 tracks of catchy, lo-fi indiepop strongly influenced by Guided By Voices, Neutral Milk Hotel and the Clean (the indiekid's perfect storm of influences).

So Claw has the best collection of jangly melodic indiepop. 'Japanese Capillaries' could have fallen out of the Jeff Mangum songbook, its see-sawing guitar and insanely catchy chorus balancing out some of its more portentous lyrics: "you can keep your 'Prometheus Rising', I've got Borges to help me pass the time." Meanwhile other songs reflect the lo-fi genius of the Flying Nun roster; 'Wet' is melancholic and
melodic, a Northern Hemispheric equivalent of the Clean or the Bats, while 'Knots' takes that lo-fi bedroom sound and adds anthemic trumpet to create something memorable.

Sour Crow isn't quite as strong (the whole package could have been a killer-no-filler 12 track album) with ‘Kandyflossin’ borrowing a little too much from Weezer for comfort. But while ‘Plank’ claims that "we're about as punk as a plank of wood", the infectious Pavement-style guitar figures in the song and the joyfully unrestrained punk-pop approach of ‘She Eats Brains’ seems to contradict this. Of course, contrariness and self-deprecation seem to be the Wednesday Club’s stock in trade, with Moebius Strip asking: “remember when we were the Medusa Snare?” But overall, there are a number of great tracks well worth hearing and downloading, and their free status is just an extra bonus - remember what Oscar Wilde said about price and value?

Links:
http://thewednesdayclub.org/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Wednesday-Club/36503041025?sk=info