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Album Review

Foxface
This Is What Makes Us Shellshock

Article written by Matti G - Jan 12, 2008

What do they put in the water in Scotland? Considering how small its population is compared with that of England, they seem to produce a far greater amount of first rate alternative music than us lot south of the border manage. The latest in a long recent line of Scottish indie hopefuls are Glasgow’s Foxface, given their break courtesy chiefly of Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble, partly through giving them a support slot on his solo tour and partly through involving them on the Chemikal Underground project Ballads Of The Book (an essential purchase, by the way, for anyone not currently up to speed with the burgeoning talent reserves accumulating north of the border), their raucous live shows have earned them plaudits (if not yet much in the way of sales figures) which have led up to this, their debut record.

The first impression is certainly an odd one. Early single Monster Seas is a completely stripped down and not in any way warm or friendly guitar assault, which sounds almost a little thrown together. Which isn’t actually a bad thing, by the way – it gets into the nervous system really quite effectively and sends a few jolts down the spine through its course. This and, to a slightly lesser extent, the following track The Cold South, belie the band to a certain extent, because This Is What Makes Us is really an album with two separate characters jostling for position – partly thrilling and thrashy rock, exemplified later in the album by Line And Hand and Face Looks Familiar, complemented with a definite bluesy tones (as a matter of fact these songs sound rather like The White Stripes might have done if the blues had been invented in the Trossachs instead of on the Mississippi Delta), and rather more Scottish-indie-standard warm and gentle acoustic guitar picking. What makes this album such a great success is that both styles manage to coexist not only peacefully but actually surprisingly coherently. The songs which fit in the latter category might not bear a great deal of musical similarity with the more electrifying tracks on the record, but they work entirely well alongside them, songs like the gloriously wistful Winners/Losers serving almost to soften the blows provided by the harder hitting material. It must be said that when listening to the acoustic elements of the album there are perhaps a few too many echoes of bands like Belle & Sebastian and My Latest Novel, but it’s a minor criticism, especially as Foxface certainly have a distinct character of their own, a more natural and perhaps more Celtic feel than most of their peers have managed to attain. Single The Last Waltz is the album’s finest moment, a truly wonderful electric pop song carried of with tremendous poise for a band so inexperienced. When the record culminates with What Do You Believe In?, they successfully produce a perfect closing moment, neatly blending the two faces of the album in a sinister piece of alt-folk with singer Michael Angus (could you get a more Scottish name without a ‘Mc’ in there, by the way?) almost chanting out a foreboding lyric which sounds like a somewhat jaunty declamation of impending apocalypse. This Is What Makes Us is a finely balanced mixture of brain and brawn, a splendid way to begin a career and another record which should have ears and eyes turning northwards.

Links:
http://www.myspace.com/foxfacemusic

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