aaamusic | On 02, May 2011

London, Spring 2011. Like a ghost in the machine of modern pop music, the spectre of Spector is rising. Here is a new band who are unlike any other around right now. They’ve got big ideas and big songs with even bigger hooks. They’ve cooked-up a new kind of peculiarly English power pop; pitched somewhere between Roxy Music and The Strokes, The Killers and Kanye West, Pulp and R ‘n’ B and Frank Sinatra. Nobody saw it coming but is was this, it turns out, that we’ve been waiting for since the last of the Next Big Things.

”I got to the stage where I wanted to do a band again…” says frontman Fred Macpherson, on the inception of the band; ”I wanted to be part of a scene again, but I looked around and there just was no real scene anymore.” At just 23, Fred is already something of a veteran. He’s fronted two of the most exciting bands to have emerged from London in the last decade: the legendarily rowdy upstarts Les Incompetents, and the legendarily doomy experimentalists Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man. Here is a young man who has been around the block of London’s indie scene so many times that he ought to have a street on it named after him by now.

”This whole Spector thing started out totally as a bedroom project. I was cutting samples from vinyl and writing songs around that; listening to a lot of J. Dilla, a lot of hip hop. I was using an MPC, a laptop and a crappy little Casio keyboard.” How did these modest forays into solo writing swell up into the big sound of the big band that is Spector in 2011? ”It just evolved, gradually, from this very insular, personal project into a proper band,” explains Fred; ”Somewhere along the line I think I remembered the way that I felt when I was watching all those great indie bands that got me into music in the first place: The Strokes, Interpol, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. All that raw energy that you just can’t get with a laptop project that you’re doing in your bedroom.” With that in mind, Fred enlisted friends, Christopher Burman (guitar), Thomas Shickle (bass), Jed Cullen (synth and guitar) and Danny Blandy (drums). Spector was born.

As a live act, Spector categorically tick the box labeled ‘raw energy.’ A crazily energetic and ludicrously good-looking five piece, they bound and shake about; fusing rawkus energy and effortless panache. Fred Macpherson is a pleasingly articulate young frontman for our times, in the tradition of Bowie, Morrissey and Jarvis, with the banter to match. In an age of bland and manufactured pop, his rakish with and astonishingly expressive baritone are nothing if not refreshing. ”I like the idea of hits” Fred says; ”And I’ll just come out and say it right now: I want our Greatest Hits album to be a double disc.” We at Luv Luv Luv have every confidence that this prophesy will come to pass.

‘Never Fade Away’ is a perfectly polished, gleaming gem of a pop song. A gloriously epic wall of sound with tender, honest lyrics and a clap-along, dance-along, thoroughly sing-along melody, it’s as infectious as the MRSA superbug. A heady mix of the electronic and the nostalgic, Spector’s debut has that rare alchemical quality that only the very best pop songs successfully convey: it sounds totally new and yet weirdly, intoxicatingly familiar. Welcome, one and all, to the feel-good hit of the summer.