Album Review

The Last Republic – Parade

• 3rd Nov 2010

There’s a certain kind of rock music that seems to have started sprouting up on our shores in the last few years. Not heavy, tattooed or chugging enough to be considered rock or metal, but yet not alternative or experimental enough to warrant the “post-rock” tag. Let’s call it The Temper Trap effect. It tends to involve big guitars that sound like big violins, big swoony verses, even bigger “soaring” choruses that probably involve hands being stretched out and gig-goers grateful they’ve found something they can take their girlfriends to.

The Last Republic are 2010’s nom du jour making a power grab for the hearts of the public, and they arrive fully-formed with a good pedigree of support behind them. Winners of last summer’s Road To V competiton, the South Wales five piece have spent most of this year recording debut album ‘Parade’ with producer Chris Sheldon, whose CV reads like a who’s who of British alternative music over the last 20 years – Biffy, Idlewild, Feeder and Therapy? have all called upon his services, while he also worked on ‘The Colour and The Shape’. As such, the production values on the record are suitably huge, impressively so for a debut.

With a keys / effects man as well as a guitarist, The Last Republic make good use of these two wildly different approaches to alter how each song builds. So whereas ‘Let’s Make Bombs’ opens on a quiet, ‘Hail To The Thief’-esque piano line, very next track ‘As Darkness Calls’ establishes itself with an off-kilter drum beat. Sticksman Aron Harris’s playing is certainly one of the highlights of the record, always innovative and keeping the band on their toes. What keeps the listener on their toes is working out just how many singers TLR has. Although the over-earnest Jon Owen is the band’s officially listed vocalist, his voice dramatically alters from song to song – so on ‘CCTV’ he sounds like Tom Chaplin, ‘(C’Mon) Flood The Gates’ features Bono, ‘The City’ is Matt Bellamy and the title track is pure Thom Yorke! The dizzying impression one gets is that, aside from lacking a strong vocal identity, The Last Republic decided to host an impromptu version of Live Aid – at any minute you expect Bob Geldof to rock up, demanding your “feckin money now”.

Unfortunately, despite the band’s noble attempts to keep the mix interesting by altering how they approach each song, each one still tends to suffer from a tragic case of “mid-tempo-itis”. It’s a critical condition affecting so many alternative acts these days, ever since (*BAIT ALERT*) Biffy made it fashionable to rock while not particularly doing anything of any note. As straight-faced over-sincere song after over-sincere song comes and goes, nothing ever really gets the pulse racing – there’s no real sense of anyone enjoying themselves and the listener never feels truly swept up in the over-reaching massiveness that The Last Republic are clearly aiming for. So once you’ve heard opener ‘CCTV’, with it’s swirling keys and yearning vocals, and then ‘Let’s Make Bombs’ with its eerie piano line and crashing chorus, you sort of know how the rest of the album is going to play out.

There are a few occasions where the band break out of their mid-tempo reverie – middle pairing ‘(C’Mon) Flood The Gates’ and ‘The City’ dare not to do the whole big swoony guitar thing, and are undoubtably better for it. ‘The City’ in particular with its distorted vocals and swinging, crunching guitars recalls ‘Muscle Museum’ by Muse. More moments that mixed up the tempo and broke free of the rigid verse-chorus-verse structure TLR impose upon themselves would unquestionably have been a fairer reflection on the band’s undoubted live ability.

If The Last Republic haven’t quite cracked it on their debut, that’s no great scandal. They only need to look at their some of their obvious influences – Muse, Biffy, 30 Seconds To Mars, Fightstar – to see that not everyone can do a Temper Trap and get it right first time. In fact, the album that ‘Parade’ most closely resembles in spirit is Muse’s debut ‘Showbiz’. Like that record, ‘Parade’ possess fitful flashes of inspiration, which are hopefully a signpost to a more daring, less conventional future. Even so, there are enough plaudits for the band to suggest they’ll be given a chance to evolve – when you have the praise of Radio 1 pair Huw Stephens and Zane Lowe ringing in your ears, you must be doing something worth investigating.