The Tunics - Dabbler's Handbook Album Review

Almost in spite of some of the rhetoric in their press release - hokey stuff about reclaiming the soul of pop music from droning synths using just charisma and a few carefully chosen chords - Croydon outfit The Tunics show on Dabbler's Handbook that they're not simply another band off the big chorus/small minds conveyor belt.

This didn't seem very likely off the back of their 2008 debut release Cost of Living, a chirpy sing-a-long about night bus muggings played out over the back of the kind of thing Alex Turner wrote as a young 'un and subsequently left in a notebook tucked under a pile of socks. The resulting exposure however created a tidal wave of appreciation in of all places Germany, whilst over here we were grooving oblivious to the sounds of Little Boots and La Roux. Go figure.

Roll forward a couple of years and the guitar is beginning to show signs of life again - Wu Lyf are at the front of the pack - but for Tunics frontman and self confessed Libertines obsessive Joe Costello the soft option of ignoring the last three perilous years of indie rock has bravely been ignored. Well ok, not quite. Eventually the temptation does prove to be too great, but the resulting effort Shadows predictably only serves to underline the gulf in class between Up The Bracket and almost anything that's tried to copy it's elegantly wasted metropolitan aesthetic ever since.

The less said about it in fact the better, and only on a couple of other occasions does Dabbler's Handbook do what it says on the PR tin, although traditionalists will be especially delighted with the tidily executed nugget Help Is On Its Way, despite its whiff of derivation.

The rest is far more downbeat and introspective, lyrically revealing a darker side to a band which many people will doubtless have written off already as unspectacular copyists. On opener Berlin Costello's atonal voice pipes "The cost of living keeps on rising/The cost of gas keeps on rising/And our children keep on dying", whilst during Slaves Ride On These Waves he follows up with "Let the girls be slaughtered in a pile/As you walk another mile in the desert". Little Man Tate this is not.

Rather than verse-chorus-shout-middle-eight-shout-cheers, musically the frame of reference often matches the melodrama, with Radio having some of the kitchen sink grandeur of Hope Of The States, whilst I'm Broke/You're Bored is equally taciturn. If anything, both are the sound of a group trying to ignore it's heritage as opposed to mining it. And bearing in mind it seems no-one can do Pete and Carl - in fact on the basis of last year's festival shows not even Pete and Carl themselves can manage it - this has to be the right course of action. On Dabbler's Handook, The Tunics do it their way.


Andy Peterson