Debut album from the five piece Art-Rock band from Sheffield, England fronted by the sassy Kate Jackson. The Long Blondes came together through a series of chance encounters. Kate (lips), Dorian (licks), Reenie (hips), Screech (sticks) and Emma (high kicks) bumped into each other at public library counters, charity shop sale rails and the dancefloors of DIY club nights. It was deliciously inevitable that this lot would get together and form a band. The Long Blondes are the part of the next chapter of Sheffields idiosyncratic musical heritage: the suburban disco fantasies of the Human League, the opulent ridiculousness of ABC, the seedy glamour of Pulp. Rough Trade. 2006. Features twelve slices of glamorous Punk including the singles 'Giddy Stratospheres', 'Separated By Motorways' and 'Weekend Without Makeup'. Rough Trade. 2006.
Review by MacKenzie Wilson
Following in the shabbily glamorous footsteps of fellow Sheffield residents Pulp, the Long Blondes' debut album, Someone to Drive You Home, is a snappy pop album of quintessentially English vignettes about how growing up is hard to do. The quintet, which is fronted by femme fatale vocalist Kate Jackson, will make you fall in love with their girlish innocence, then steal your boyfriend and break your heart. The Long Blondes make it all seem dangerously romantic, but in a coquettish kind of way -- the joys of being a girl have never seemed so lovely or sexy, hence the impure thoughts of "Swallow Tattoo" - "Give me a good film noir and a bottle of gin." Pulp alumnus Steve Mackey adds the perfect amount of polish to these 12 playful, guitar-driven songs. Just one listen to "Once and Never Again" will make you a believer: its girlish harmonies and cheeky outlook suggest that leaving that guy behind won't hurt too much, after all, "You're only nineteen for God's sake, you don't need a boyfriend." What does anyone know about love at 19? Singles such as "Weekend Without Makeup" and "Giddy Stratospheres," and b-side "Lust in the Movies" arrive in new form, with Jackson growling and cooing alongside Dorian Cox and her jangly, Smiths-like guitars. Meanwhile, their ballads, such as the cinematic "A Knife for the Girls" and "Heaven Help the New Girl" are equally convincing in sound and style. Defining what it means to be in a pop band might prove difficult 2006, for what is pop music anymore? Lucky for us, the Long Blondes have figured it out for themselves. Someone to Drive You Home is one of those albums that's honest to goodness fun, and pulling it off with as much pastiche as the Long Blondes makes it one of the year's nicest arrivals. Jarvis Cocker and co. would be proud.
The racks are cluttered with promising albums from British post-punk bands boasting charismatic singers, needling guitar work, and hollow, driving drums. But what separates the Long Blondes' debut album is lush-voiced frontwoman Kate Jackson's dexterity in exploring the complexities of women's relationships with other women. You'd have to reach back to the halcyon days of riot grrrl to find the subject probed this deeply. On songs like "Once and Never Again" and "Heaven Help the New Girl", Jackson is the wise survivor counseling her young, naive sisters; on "Giddy Stratospheres" and "In the Company of Women" she competes for male affection; on "Separated by Motorways" she celebrates girl friendship. Turns out Jackson shares more with a certain Charlie's Angel than just a name. --Amy Phillips
The Long Blondes
Someone to Drive You Home
[Rough Trade; 2006]
Rating: 8.2
Like candles in the goddamn wind, man. The long, blonde leading ladies of classic film were larger than life, and every one a muse: "She's a femme fatale," Nico sang with the Velvet Underground, supposedly in reference to fellow Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. "She looks like Eve Marie-Saint in 'On the Waterfront'," swooned Lloyd Cole on his 1984 hit "Rattlesnakes". Even Billy Bragg had Woody Guthrie's "Ingrid Bergman" on Mermaid Avenue.
A quintet of two guys and three dolls, the Long Blondes seem obsessed with cinema-- Sedgwick, Anna Karina, Arlene Dahl, From Here to Eternity, and C.C. Baxter: All they want is "a good film noir and a bottle of gin." If those starlets of the silver screen can be blamed for our culture's impossible standards regarding the opposite sex, clearly it's all that hardcore, girl-next-door interporn that offers enough "reality" for guys to hold down jobs, tie our shoes, and buy Valentine's Day presents. Sheffield's the Long Blondes say: You could have both!!!
Produced by Pulp's Steve Mackey (singles re-recorded, sadly), the Long Blondes inherit that band's arched back and sharp tongue, plus a bit of Elastica's love of borrowed late-70s riffs. So they're the pop-punk Dusty Springfield to fellow Sheffield band the Arctic Monkeys' provincial kids-today Kinks. But what the album really tells us most about is the divide between the girls on film and our little iWorld-- the contrasts between romantic notions and dreary humdrum, wants and needs, love and being in love, and inertia and bone-jumping. It makes you wonder why anyone actually likes the Kooks.
"I know all about fear and desire," Jackson asserts on brazen opener "Lust in the Movies", sounding like she lives on lipgloss, cigarettes, and glasses of wine. And she does know fear, of a sort: She's often measuring herself against idealized competition, as on "In the Company of Women" ("What's she got that I might not?"), or waiting out the other girl rather than risk loneliness (on "Only Lovers Left Alive"). She talks a lot in the imperative ("Don't turn around, don't walk away," or "Don't go to London"), and, on "Heaven Help the New Girl", she updates the classic trembly girl-group ballad better than anybody (apart from Camera Obscura's Tracyanne Campbell), with an arrangement equally suitable for Morrissey or Colin Meloy.
Jackson's got desire down, as well: "There are wants and there are needs/ And they're two very different things/ You can love or be in love," she sets forth in "Weekend Without Makeup". On upbeat twentysomething tragedy "Swallow Tattoo", she's distressed by the significance of a common prison tattoo, but still wants to... you know. And on the extra-catchy single "Once and Never Again", she knows how it feels to be 19 -- and she'd "love to feel a girl [that] age."
As Pulp's Jarvis Cocker quipped on his band's breakthrough album, His 'n' Hers: "Imagine it's a film and you're the star.../ You might get your happy ending/ Your ending, the thing you deserve." Most so-called "cinematic" records earn that distinction due to some quirk of reverb or their use of space, but the Long Blondes only have modern England's typically confined, 17-year-old-from-Doncaster guitar-dudish sound. Instead, it's the songs themselves, their narratives, and their characters that speak to the band's widescreen ambitions. None achieves this with more success than "You Could Have Both", the Long Blondes' most expansive moment, as a blistering circa-1993 proto-Britpop guitar charges into yet another love triangle that doesn't make any difference to Jackson. "I don't kid myself about happy endings," she insists, speaking at last like a true femme fatale.
-Marc Hogan, January 12, 2007
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