I’m really not sure what to make of Castles, to be honest. Tonight Is Goodbye seem to be a living breathing bundle of contradictions, and this little mini album (or possibly a hemi-album, as it’s six tracks long) throws everything and the kitchen sink at you in a little over twenty minutes. Punk, pop, indie, post-hardcore … Tonight Is Goodbye are all of these things, but also none of them.
Tonight Is Goodbye were one of the lucky young acts who were voted into support slots on the 2006 Taste Of Chaos tour, and Castles makes no bones about displaying a musical proficiency worthy of the accolade. But it must have been a strange sight to behold this cheeky yet sussed young pop band supporting the histrionic heroes of modern corporate rock; they must have stuck out like sore thumbs wrapped in Hello Kitty plasters.
Put it this way – when was the last time a band actually managed to surprise you with their sound? Trust me, even when you review records every day, it doesn’t happen often, but Tonight Is Goodbye raised my eyebrows a number of times. There’s a strong current of pop-punk energy flowing through Castles, but the backbeat rhythms and funky choppy guitar parts – owing a lot more to the skronky indie scene than the Kerrang Klones circuit – slice and dice the momentum into songs that use space to emphasise impact. It’s reminiscent of New Wave in its angular attack, but has an upper layer of simultaneous bombast and self-deprecation that leaves you perpetually off your guard.
And there’s Tonight Is Goodbye’s contradictory nature for you, focused in (and best summed up by) the vocals of Ant West, who manages to combine the confidence of Brandon Flowers with the oh-so-fey-and-confused air of the Camden cardigan set. But unless I read him very wrong, he’s actually mocking both sides of the equation, subverting the Vegas showmanship with self-deprecating storytelling, and sending up the behind-the-bike-shed sniggers of the indie kids by making them look as immature as they really are. When West sings
“why oh why / do girls always cry / when you tell them that they’re past their sell-by?”
in “Fire in the Hole”, it’s not only obvious that he knows already, but that he finds it quite amusing that anyone else could be so naïve as to not be aware of it. Stop the press – young band in effective deployment of irony and sarcasm shocker!
But even if you don’t get hung up on the vocals – which, on delivery style alone, may be a trifle too NME-friendly for some – Castles still has that bag of musical tricks to fall back on. By stealing ideas from many different corridors, Tonight Is Goodbye find themselves in a room of their own – and that’s a pretty good move for any band to make.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Castles, indie, pop, pop-punk, post-hardcore, rock, Tonight Is Goodbye
