The last couple of weeks appear to have been a relative quiet time for great new albums with only a few notable exceptions. Here's one! Yesterday saw the release of the debut album from Glasgow band Catholic Action, In Memory Of and it's surely one to sit up in take notice of.
It all exists within the noble tradition: Teenage Fanclub, Franz Ferdinand and Travis (when they were good), The Pastels, great guitar acts going back to Glam beyond. Catholic Action, (oh and the name is wonderful too), know how to have a great time and understand and relish up ripping up the pop tradition and laying it down for the kids who weren't old enough to experience it all, ten twenty, thirty, forty and fifty years ago. They also sound as if they're having the time of their lives!
It's not an original record really except in that it's unusual to hear an album that sounds as good as this one does, in this particular tradition in 2017. Catholic Action are masters at what they do, astonishing for ones so young. Song after song either sounds like a hit single from 1973 or a masterful re-take of Teenage Fanclub's hair-raisingly wonderful Everything Flows. A joyously wonderful record inappropriately bedecked with floral memorial wreaths around the bands guitars and drums. This is surely a beginning not an end. Catholic Action are writing and performing the songs that the Gallagher brothers would surely love to be coming up with in 2017 but are quite incapable of.
The further I delve into In Memory Of, the more astonished I am at how good it can be. How remarkably assured in its grace. Catholic Action prove themselves to be masters of something of a last art. There may not be the mass-market for this kind of thing anymore. Attention seems to be elsewhere and what momentum there is seems to be directed towards the likes of Ed Sheeran and the aforementioned Gallagher shysters. This is a crime. Spotlights should be on the likes of Catholic Action instead. Where the action really is. Seek them out!
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