Although your reviewer can hardly decry the attention The Futureheads are currently receiving (and hell, their eponymous debut has barely left his overworked CD player), we should remember they're still only the tip of a humongously exciting iceberg in the North East at present.
Indeed, whether their home town of Sunderland is ultimately big enough to hold them and near neighbours THE GOLDEN VIRGINS remains to be seen, as Lucas Renney's boys came rapidly up on the rails with their superb recent album "Songs Of Praise". Within its' tastefully-upholstered sleeve was all the proof you need that style, panache, alcohol-fuelled reverie and depraved sexual longing can never be written off in this fickle world.
And, in terms of a voyeur's paradise, then look no further than the brilliant "Light In Her Window." Swooning into life on blurred, chiming guitar and simply made by that tinkly, chromatic piano, it's the very essence of 'slow-burning' and opens with the threatening lines: "well there's a light in her window again, I've got a head full of whisky and gin/ I don't know how or when to begin when she lets me in." Wow. Motive and intent, m'lud, not least when our Lucas discovers he's got a rival for the lady's intentions and...well, let's just say he's spurred on to unleash a guitar solo of the most incredible violence that sounds like Andy Gill manhandling a room full of dentists' drills, before - spent and panting - the band take it right down to nothing. Some single.
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If you've not enjoyed the glorious punishment meted out thus far, then try the demo recordings of album favourites "Staying Sober" and "Sleep With Me Tonight", where the beatings continue until morale is irrelevant. The former is nihilism personified ("I'll pour myself a whisky, and chase it with a gin/ and I'll go out to the bars tonight and drown myself in sin") and the latter is hilariously louche, featuring a great catchline "leave your morals at the door and sleep with me tonight" which has to be one of 2004's best choruses.
Admittedly, they're rough and ready, and whether we really need versions of these songs recorded in a shed for a fiver while Renney has his head down the bog is debatable. Still, in terms of drunken, lusty intensity they can't be beaten even in this shaky form and ,as talking to God on the big white phone goes, they're
compellingly alcoholic and anything but anonymous.
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