Sheffield, England's Slow Club may be a duo, but their full-length debut Yeah So suggests otherwise with its multifaceted and undeniably affecting collection of rockabilly soul, folksy ballads, and soaring melodies that simultaneously break through the clouds and wrench back down into your gut. At times contemplative ("I Was Unconscious, It Was A Dream", "There Is No Way To Say I'm Leaving You") and others playful ("Because We're Dead") and celebratory ("It Doesn't Have To Be Beautiful"), the album is a riff on the varying manifestations of love—for the duo, an endlessly fruitful subject matter.
Over the course of the record's 12 tracks, singer/guitarist Charles Watson and singer/percussionist Rebecca Taylor deliver a pitch-perfect combination of finger-picked, strummed, and snare beaten rhythms; heartfelt and organically weaved male-female harmonies; and wordy musings on friendship, bruised hearts, and nostalgic yearning that recall the brighter moments of The Magic Numbers self-titled debut.
It's unclear whether or not the duo's songs are self-referential or a series of separate narratives, but either way the Slow Club (who call themselves "a pair of apples") display an intimate and learned musical interrelation that is uniquely dynamic and their own. As the bio suggests on their Moshi Moshi Records page, the Slow Club is really a one-man band simply made of two people.
Those two brains working as one achieve their most colorful successes on the album opener "When I Go," where the shared narrative relays two friends contemplating getting married to each other if they're both still single by a certain age; the electric up-tempo "Giving Up One Love," which contrasts its melancholy topic with the album's brightest and sunniest chorus; and the beaming single "It Doesn't Have To Be Beautiful"—an anthemic celebration of love, friendship and all things in-between:
In the electrical storm you were running wild / You had a death wish you were a child / I came to bare in the lighting bolt / If you came back as the deep sea, I would come back as the salt.
Rating: A peck on the cheek, a bucket of clams, and a field of daisies.
