Album Review

The Indelicates – America

• 28th Mar 2008

The Indelicates have always seemed to existed on the fringes of indie.

They have always been there, like a niggling memory at the back of your mind, overshadowed by NME cover stars and mainstream straddling bands, but they have always been there.

Affiliated with Art Brut and featuring a founding member of The Pipettes, The Indelicates take the lyrical kitchen sink drama of the former and the musical retro fascination of the latter and then weigh it down with a tremendous intellect, a barrelful of cynicism and a pinch of sarcasm, leaving them well below the radar of most lowest common denominator Britons and outside the interests of the average indie kid.

And it is these people that are missing out. Compare and contrast the single, America, with the Razorlight single of the same name, Johnny Borrel and his cohorts may have made a catchy hummable hit for the mass market while also pleading for the acceptance and the dollars of an American public but it is The Indelicates that have found a rockier sound than evident on their previous singles and produced a tongue in cheek battle cry for British indie bands so determined to crack the notoriously difficult American market.

Radio friendly guitars and drum breaks build around the ever present piano aswell as strings in a pleasing pop arrangement, that is at the same time aurally enjoyable and ever so ironic, while the lyrics (a lynchpin of The Indelicates’ existence) jibe at the moral ambiguity of rock stars snorting ‘fair trade coke’ and underpins the plight of trans-Atlantic obsessed artists as it delivers the rousing chorus:

‘It must be America,
It must be America,
Or nothing at all’