4 FT Fingers – New Beginnings Of Old Stories

• 1st May 2008

This album could be placed by the listener by thinking of the band Stereophonics, putting the finishing touches to their second album but transported wholesale into the alt-rock tradition, and lacking a high-watermark defining debut. There’s a touch of the pop-punk too, but throughout the album there are endearing purple passages of crisp riffs, solid rhythm and a sense of well-drilled practice turning into tight, carefully plotted songs.

The register of the cymbals, the snares and the kicks is clean to fault; the bass guitar plays supporting and comfortable lines, occasionally heading up and down the fretboard in a quick trot. Words like ‘home’ are pronounced ‘oo-oo-mme’, Billy Bragg intoning over a Home Counties Blink 182 that grew up torn between Launchcast and Last.fm.

‘After All This Time’, for example, opens promisingly, the Stones filtered through an Xbox 360 running Singstar, and then it reverts to type – four to the floor drumbeats propelling a song in a dead straight line to the moshpit. Rising and dropping bass lines two-step with an endearingly chunky chorus, finesse drained out like Wolverine’s long gone skeleton.
‘Little Did We Know’ showcases some more clod-shod lyrics which to be true to them know what they want to do – express a sentimentality that is created through the music rather than jar against it. The album is full of workmanlike sub-Jam lines like ‘Some politicians do very little for you I’m afraid to say/ Let’s bind them together and take back our land the lies will stop and so will the backhands.’ The lack of vocal range of the vocalist does limit the palette, and it is this stolidly adhered to course that reminds me of the transplanted ‘Phonics, sans Kelly Jones rasping individuality.

The title track is all kinetics at the start; we’re sensing some clever guitar work until the ‘hey hey hey hey’ chant drops and it is back to pop-punk alt rock from Dudley … or Doncaster … or Wigan, or anywhere, anywhere in Albion. This is the other side of the street from Docherty’s bunting and reminiscing and middle class reprieves; this is the music that the kids buzz into their earphones on the school playground shuffled with r’n’b and hip hop, reflecting a surfaces society dealing with a political malaise, a credit crunch and a worldwide love/hate with America; dealing with the now-ubiquitous sight of low rise jeans and hoodies in identikit provincial town centres. Imagination slightly crushed. It is a heartbreaking progress of a kind – new beginnings of old stories indeed.