Albums of The Year # 71 Fort Not - The Club Is Open

 From this month:

 

Thirty years back Swedish pretenders Wannadies turned up with a sound that was an awkward approximation of British Indie. It was childlike, minimalist, tuneful and somehow not quite right. Nowadays, similar acts of cultural appropriation are much more seamless. Take Gothenberg's Fort Not and their debut album The Club is Name.

The band take their name from Emily Skillings first collection of poetry. Their musical inspiration from a mix tape compiled by Calvin Johnson, (Beat Happening) Pavement and C-86. This is shambling indie of the kind that fans of early Primal Scream, Razorcuts and Tallulah Gosh would recognise as a quite perfect facsimile of that whole inept, carefree sound.

There is so much of this kind of stuff around nowadays that it's quite difficult to know what to say about it. Except that Fort Not do it terribly well. In Amsterdam they advise you to 'dance, dance, dance to the radio.' But certainly not in the way that Ian Curtis did. This is one long picnic of fizzy lemonade and sweeties. A skip through a field of daisies. Dancing to the portable radio.

Of course this infantilism is all complete affectation at this remove. The songs on The Club is Name are actually all highly crafted, even though they're presented as found objects. Pictures scribbled  in crayon as a day at Primary School draws to a close. Not so. Fort Not know exactly what they're doing.

This is a good record and repeats further plays. Whether you will warm to it depends utterly on what you feel about this whole sub-genre. Well into its thirties now it's a sound and sensibility utterly preserved in aspic. Like Peter Pan, or Oskar from Tin Drum destined never to grow up. In some ways the ultimate retreat from reality.

That's an argument for elsewhere Fort Nots stake their claim to the growing queue of candidates for the Indie 2020 crown along with En Attendant Ana, Emma Kupa, Spinning Coin, Galore, Orielles, Proper Ornaments, Strawberry Generation, Tapeworms and several others. This is wistful unconsummated yearning that hits all the wrong notes it's aiming for beautifully.