Dirty Hits. Availability: LP, CD, cassette and digital download. Length 33:46.
When Manchester four piece ‘Pale Waves’ first burst on the scene in 2017 with singles like ‘Television Romance’ and especially ‘There’s a Honey’ they seemed to become a major act overnight. But there were doubters as well as believers.
Their perhaps over-generously lengthed debut album, ‘My Mind Makes Noises’, in 2018, although charting and getting reasonable reviews, came in for fire for being perhaps a little too uniform, or even samey. Likewise their stage act was criticised, including I’m afraid by ourselves, for showing a band that didn’t really have enough original material yet to sustain a headliner slot. The overall impression was of a great band, or at least a band that was going to be great, which had tried to break the big time slightly before they were ready. We have thus been looking forward to the band’s second album, the rather shorter ‘Who am I’, with great interest.
We have not been disappointed. This record is very different to the first, with driving Rock rhythms and a greater range and variety. It is heavily influenced by the likes of Avril Lavigne, but although such influences have helped to make the album a good deal more exciting, it never quite slips into the derivative.
The first album was written by singer Heather Baron-Gracie and drummer Ciara Doran. This time round, Baron-Gracie has handled the writing duties in concert with a number of outside collaborators. As a result, some of the material is distinctly personal. In fact, the record has been referred to semi-seriously as Baron-Gracie’s ‘coming out album’ and she has said several times that she’d grown tired of simply letting people assume she was straight. Doran has, after all, long been openly LGBTQ and has recently come out further as non-binary, so Baron-Gracie has just followed something of the same path.
Most particularly, there is the glorious ‘She is my religion’, a straightforward lesbian love song for which there is a wonderful romantic video, featuring Baron-Gracie and her real-life girlfriend: fellow songwriter Kelsi Luck. The latter is another influence, particularly when it comes to her vocal style, for example with the album’s opener, ‘Change’.
‘Tomorrow’ is a broader LGBTQ anthem and another real rocker, as is ‘Fall to Pieces’ which, unusually these days, has a good old fashioned guitar solo. ‘You don’t own me’ is the heaviest Rock on the record and perhaps shows the most Avril Lavigne influence too. On the other hand ‘Wish U were here’ has a gentler, more complex sound which treats on the idea of god as female.
‘I just needed you’ and ‘Odd ones out’ are gentler love songs. Meanwhile, ‘Run to’ has something of the feel of 1970s punk curiosity Plastic Bertrand, and deals with the worries of a loving parent fretting over what their grown-up child is getting up to, when she’s really just being independent.
The album closes with the title track, ‘Who am I’, an emotionally impressive power ballad about the doubts and uncertainties of facing an often confusing world.
Ultimately, ‘Who am I’ is what we might have hoped ‘My Mind Makes Noises’ would be: a brilliant, exciting album without a single weak track and without falling into the previous album’s trap of pushing length generosity without enough good material to sustain it. In our opinion this is a far stronger record and much to be recommended.
Hera Says.
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Hera says I should be the star now 