Thursday, November 18, 2004

Parallax View Single Of The Week

So now you've been good boys and girls and donated four quid to your local charity concern rather than buy that Band Aid record, you'll have noticed that you're now one disc short in what otherwise would have been your collection. This is, of course, where Parallax View steps in (albeit uninvited) to point you in the right direction. And a very old-skool indie direction it is indeed, turning off at Interstate 5 the first single from The Wedding Present for several years. Gedge has shunned the scope of Cinerama for the kitchen-sink dramas of old, and the lyrical content can be summed up thus: boy seeks love; girl just wants sex; my heart bleeds. The 6 minute track is a bit of a slow-builder, something of a grower (as we used to say before the days of the iPod shuffle) and is in truth more of an album track than a single. Nevertheless, it's an appetising taster for the forthcoming full-length (due Feb '05) and the additional tracks, as ever with Gedge & Co., bear up to repeated listening.

And yet, the Wedding Present are pipped at the post for PV Single Of The Week by none other than Embrace, those pasty-faced mopers recently back in vogue thanks to the patronage of Chris Martin. This is, of course, another typical example of just how tits-up modern pop culture is: Embrace are better songwriters than performers, so in a just universe they should be writing songs for Chris Martin, who has a good voice mostly wasted on plinkety-plonkety pish. And whereas the Martin-penned Gravity was a track so dull it made dishwater look like acid rain, the McNamaras' own composition Ashes has a sufficiently mighty chorus that you can forget for four minutes that the singer is drippier than liquefied nasal detritus. Sneer all you like, but you'll be getting a big woolly scarf from someone this Xmas, and you may as well have something to wave it to this winter. No kazoos on this one, though, which I think you'll all agree is a mighty shame.

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