FEWS – Means

Stark, monochrome debut filled with promise...

Back in 2002 the moody, monochrome new band Interpol released an album called ‘Turn Out The Bright Lights’, an album that was, for want of a better cliché, an absolute game changer. Though fellow New Yorkers The Strokes might have reminded the world of its continued craving for unapologetic swagger and killer riffs, it was Paul Banks and Co.’s tightening up of the brand of forward looking post punk invented by Orange Juice and Gang of Four that would set a precedent followed by an entire generation of guitar bands. But being king of the mid-‘00s post punk offered an life expectancy brief enough to rival that enjoyed on Westeros’ iron throne, and Interpol were quickly ousted by Editors, who in turn were deposed by Bloc Party, who in turn were kicked out by TV On The Radio. But despite the shortcomings of their subsequent albums, ‘TOTBL' clearly demonstrated the sheer breadth and beauty that could still be summoned by tethering simple entwined guitar licks to a chugging rhythm section.

I only mention Interpol’s debut at such lengths because ‘Means’ is its spiritual successor in nearly every manner. Granted, new kids on the block FEWS hail from Stockholm rather than New York, but the same sense of detached perfectionism courses through the veins of the music they make. From the moment opener ‘I.D.’ kicks into life the template for the rest of the album is set: pulsating drums, shuddering bass and twin guitars so angular they could have been lifted from an AQA exam paper. Time and time again they resist the urge to overly flesh out a song, preferring instead to leave it in a semi-skeletal state and leave the bones of its creation bare for the world to see.

This is especially effective when FEWS pull Interpol’s most enduring trick and lurch from a major key rise to a sudden minor key drop. This is pulled off most pleasingly on lead single ‘The Zoo’, and was apparently the only thing Dan Carey had to hear before agreeing to record their full length release. The producer is a perfect fit for the group. His ability to harness a naturally prog-inclined band’s more air-headed tendencies and offer them a clear end destination to work towards resulted in Toy’s peerless Join The Dots, and a good helping of the same studio magic rubs off on ‘Means’. If anything the band are slightly too precise and controlled in their approach, offering the listener hints of a more expansive, free-flowing psychedelic act hidden underneath an armour of perfectionism.

FEWS are a band still trying to form their own identity away from the burgeoning Stockholm psychedelia scene and so it’s no surprise that they occasionally miss the mark. The lyrics to the forgettable ‘The Queen’ sound like placeholder ad-libs that the singer never got round to finishing while ‘Zlatan’ is so forgettable it barely registers in the first place. Also the band don’t particularly strike me as either loutish or fun-loving enough to merit a song called ‘Drinking Games’, though, to be fair, the song’s chorus refrain of “Get back just by midnight / In the starlight” is one of the most poetic descriptions of stumbling home rat-arsed and alone I’ve ever heard.

There is also a danger of their simplistic formula wearing extremely thin when stretched to fill an entire album’s runtime and rendering the whole album entirely forgettable. Do you remember ‘An End Has A Start’? Nope, neither do I and nor Tom Smith. Thankfully FEWS have foreseen this potential problem and elect to ensure that after the halfway point nearly every song features some unique addition to the template, meriting it more than a three-minute appointment with the listener’s consciousness. This results in two of the albums most spellbinding moments in the form of ‘Keep On Telling Myself’s crescendo, when a huge sounding string section that doesn’t feature anywhere else on the album cannonballs in out of nowhere to steal the show, and ‘Ill’s thunderous four minute long outro, which evidences just what the band are capable of when they go off script.

In many ways ‘Means’ is a better debut that ‘Turn On The Bright Lights’, though not a better album. It’s a record that’s brimming with potential but which still has tonnes of room leftover for further improvement, which is exactly what the first entry in any band’s budding discography should be like. Any act taking a long view of their career wants to tease the world with their own imperfect introduction, their own ‘Leisure’ or ‘Pablo Honey’. What you don’t want is to release a debut so goddamn perfect you spend the rest of your career living in its shadow, a ‘Silent Alarm’ or a ‘The Back Room’.

The ‘00s post punk bands FEWS share the most DNA with all crammed everything they had to offer the world onto their first albums without paying heed to what they would have left in the tank down the road. 'Means', on the other hand, shows a band putting off their prime in order to dig foundations on which to build bigger and better things.

7/10

Words: Josh Gray

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