Released 28/06/2010, through Satellite Of Love
If everyone in the world listened to bands like Alba Lua, nasty things like war, terrorism and that business with the Catholic Church just wouldn’t happen. The Ballad Of Joseph Merrick is so relentelessly dreamy, it’s gaze firmly directed at the bottom of its shoe, that you can’t believe the world isn’t populated by ickle wickle bunny wabbits and covered by multi-coloured clouds that rain marshmallows and acid tabs onto a land where everyone prances around like Homer in that classic Simpsons scene.
The title track of this E.P opens with faraway acoustic pluckings, a xylophone and a gentle voice that should be reading Tennyson poems. It is driven by ‘ahh’s’ and a refrain of ‘I am the elephant man’, an interestingly dark subject matter considering the pretty instrumentation that could lighten the heart of the particularly embittered England fan still travelling back from Bloemfontaine after forking out thousands of pounds to watch a bunch of overrated, overpaid turds squeeze dry the dreams of a nation of believers who again chose to ignore logic and dare to buy into the players baseless pre-tournament shit that maybe, just maybe, they’d make us proud to support England this time (still bitter? Moi?).
The second track is called Sungaze, and sounds exactly like a song called Sungaze should- it opens with xylophone and whistling, for chrissakes, before giving way to a big chunky organ line and a child-like choral harmony of ‘la la lal la la.’ If you don’t like it you probably don’t like Christmas.
Valley of Abra doesn’t change the style too much- pluckings, sotto lyrics that are often quite hard to make out. In fact the lyrics are generally quite tough to understand properly but it matters not because the music is so atmosphere driven that, though their meaning will hopefully come to light on repeated listens, for now we are happy to let Alba Lua chug us along on their marshmallow cloudscapes. More please.
Posted In Single Reviews, Jul 01 2010.
Words - Jimbo