Be A Familiar / Tango In The Attic
You'd Make A Great Ghost/Blunderground (Self Released)
Yet again the vagaries of postal strikes and possible light fingered staff leave me getting a copy of this near six months after it was released. Which is a shame, but it’s well worth the wait.
What we have here is the split debut from Be A Familiar and Tango In The Attic. Which, if we ignore the overly clean production that dogs many-a band’s first big trip to the recording studio offers a pair of cracking tune.
First up The Familiars You’d Make A Great Ghost; a perky pop number with a seriously dark heart - as the title would very obviously suggest. There’s something disarmingly mainstream about the Familiar-sound (as I’m sure it won’t become known as). Catchy verse chorus doubles with a building instrumentation and multi-layered vocal part. Building to the huge chant-along ending that makes their live performances so exciting.
Blunderground by the Tango boys has an plaintively urgent verse matched with a Futureheadsy oh-oh chorus. There’s something a bit arch about how they play with this building to the ‘big’ ending. You can almost hear their ayebrows raising to check your seeing how smart the structure is. But, it stops short of being overly knowing. We can expect interesting stuff from them in the future.
Tony Kiernan
