aaamusic | On 20, Nov 2011

Spain’s Layabouts are, philosophically speaking, an extremely interesting band. Do bear with me here, hopefully this will come out as less pretentious than it sounds right now. They take a long mothballed art form, straight up, balls out Rock ‘n’ Roll, complete with Elvis Presley on the cover, don’t do anything new with it, and still manage to conjure up an album that is considerably more fun than several barrels of particularly whimsical monkeys. How does this happen? Is it something to do with the band? Possibly, all the songs featured here of roughly the same ilk, awesome riffage, howling vocals, lyrics about cars/girls/badassery/etc. and just the one track over three minutes long. More likely it’s something to do with Rock ‘n’ Roll itself, the primal thrill in hearing something unbelievably loud, threatening to collapse at any time, coming for you and everything you stand for. In any case, it’s a formula that Layabouts have got down an absolute treat, because even while listening to this, one is aware of the other bands that do this shtick much better, the most obvious comparison being Sweden’s most hilariously cocky, The Hives, but, if you’re anything like me, you’re having way too much fun to care.

 

It is slightly moot going through individual tracks, this shares the ignominious honour of being the second album that, one track in, I’ve been able to accurately predict what the rest of the album sounds like. The difference between this album and the debut of Australian garage rock tykes Dangerous! Is that Layabouts have a vastly less punchable singer and, ironically enough for a band on their fourth album, a more developed, more genuine sense of fun. Another way this differs from most other seemingly unapologetically retro rockers is the sheer lack of irony on offer here, these guys didn’t call a song Chevy so they could court a fanbase caught up in nostalgia for youth (whether it was actually theirs or not), they called it Chevy because Chevy’s are cool as shit. And why not?

 

There are a couple of moments that stand out, the Dick Dale on steroids riff of River of the Moon is a cracker, and they showcase a decent Desert Sessions impression on Number/Figures before falling back into swaggering riffs and stone age drum patterns. Let’s be honest here, Radiohead, this is not. This is prime musical junk food, delicious, but bad for you in the long run and not all that satisfying. However, any band that can (almost definitely) unintentionally intellectualise what is probably the most unutterably silly genre in music, let alone Rock as a whole, automatically gets my vote. If you’re up for some silly fun, or if they’re playing live near you, you could do much worse than check this out.

 

Will Howard