I like it when people leave comments after the posts on ANBAD. I always try to respond, partly because I like chatting to readers, and partly because it’s good for SEO purposes or something.
So when Kate dropped me a message after an old post about the excellent Rizzle Kicks, I hopped over to reply. Here’s a rarity: I’m recommending you read something that I wrote, but only because it helps clarify the rest of this post.
Kate didn’t like that I had a pop at the Brit School – the UK’s generic pop hit sausage-machine that has given us luminaries like Jessie J and Adele.
She defended The Brit school by saying that it helped nurture talent. And it does, to an extent, but only in the way that a record industry-owned school would like to mould its own future income-stream-generators.
Sadly, it’s viewed by many as the only way to go about it – but, as I noted in the my reply, none of The Pixies, The Smiths, Public Enemy, etc. honed their craft in a performing arts school, and yet still sold zillions of records. The record industry was still keen to take their slice from them.
Places like the Brit School do produce genuinely interesting talent – like Rizzle Kicks – but they’re the exceptions. A band like the excellently- monikered Lab Coast wouldn’t be found in the confines of the Brit School, and neither would they like to be, I’d imagine. It’s curious in some respects, because Lab Coast make excellent, poppy, beautiful songs – they kind that can/should sell truckloads of records.
Really Realize is a fabulous slice of lazy, rumbling fuzz-pop that sounds like the band are trying to be cantankerous – but the honeyed sound can’t help but reveal that they’re actually having the time of their lives. Rough-hewn but cotton-soft, this is a soaring song of real love and warmth.
Kate and other Brit School attendees might not want to be in a no-frills band like Lab Coast, but even they couldn’t help but swoon at the delightful sounds.
MORE: labcoast.tumblr.com