Albums

Album Review: The Teenagers

Album: Reality Check
Label: XL Recordings

A Parisian trio that simply defy you to mock them. Now fully-fledged Brits, based in London’s East End, they still carry their accents and use them to throw surprisingly brave wit and bitter emotion at you. Cutting, colourful and obsessively crude, this their debut album will surprise you but will it find a home in your heart?

“I fucked my American cunt” is certainly the line to make you sit up. Well, opening track ‘Homecoming’ is a less than subtle story of cross-Atlantic boy-meets-girl with that lurking French accent muddying the whole issue further. Popping drums meet a warping lo-fi mix of synthesizers head on. New single ‘Love No’ follows with big battering bass and guitars, spoken verses and a bitch-slap of “boom-tish” drum samples. It’s a cleverly simplistic track full of energy and youth but lacking that, er, how do you say, “je ne sais quoi” to really propel it as far as they‘d like.

That goes for most of the rest of the album. Only ’Feeling Better’ and ‘Streets Of Paris’ hit home with big bustling rhythms and witty, repeating lyrics that will drive you crazy. It’s a shame but the thing that will make you remember them most though, apart from the steady flow of F-words, is the fake-sounding French accents spouting staccato English lyrics. You almost want to join in with the “zis and zat and zem” intricacies. There’s more if you scratch the surface but you‘ll have to stifle that childish snigger first.

For fans of: The Mae Shi, Friendly Fires, Van She
Band links = The Teenagers

Buy this CD!

Tags: album, cd, The Teenagers, Reality Check, review

John’s review also appears in Music Zine.

Bookmark to:

Previous & Next