Released: 11-01-09, Fiction Records

If you’ve read many of the Ones To Watch 2009 lists that have been the backbone of so many websites, newspapers and magazines over the last few weeks, you would have noticed a startling symmetry between them.  Names like Little Boots, Florence And The Machine and VV Brown (who are all actually pretty good) have been bandied about by everyone and anyone desperate to fill a bit of copy.  

        

Added to this motley collection of pretty ladies, one band reigned supreme as the hotly tipped band of 2009, the secret-that-won’t-be-a-secret anymore.  That band is White Lies and, judging by the media coverage their major label financial backing is getting them, they seem destined to become a huge hit this year.

       
So does this mean they’re any good?  Well, if ‘To Lose My Life’ is anything to go by, absolutely fucking not.  This song is dirge; sounding like a bad Editors B-Side, shat out by Tom Smith during a particularly virulent bout of gloom-rock diarrhoea.

      
It starts promisingly enough, with it’s menacing guitars sounding like ‘Only By The Night’ era Kings Of Leon, and a slightly dancey ambience.  Unfortunately this soon dissipates in a wave of awful lyrics about souls soaring ‘above the trees’ and some bloke crying ‘next to the chapel steps.’

      
And this is all before we get to the horrible, shocking, depressing, weakly sung chorus.  Now I’ve got a soft spot for the melancholy, always have done, from lovelorn teen days of Buckley, through Nirvana, Ryan Adams to the  Tom Waits’s and Bon Iver’s of my current tastes.  But the oft-repeated chorus of let’s grow old together/and die at the same time strikes me as a step too far.   It appears that these not unattractive, soon to be massively oversexed lads are drawing a gloomy comparison between falling in love and dying. And fair enough, we're all a bit angry sometimes.  But this just feels like forced soulless Joy Division lite, or Robert Smith without the sense of humour, Kurt Cobain without the talent.

And more than anything I really quite dislike the sentiment of this chorus which only makes me like the whole song even  less than before (which admittedly wasn‘t much). Which in turn presents the opportunity to sign off this review with a really rather childish bit of rhymery….


White Lies?  Shite Lies!

What do you think of Shite Lies?! Is our man beng too harsh?  What about other hotly tipped acts?! Have you seen VV Brown's hair?!

Posted In Single Reviews, Jan 15 2009. Words - Terry