After a decades-long struggle to get the rights to their music back from the clutches of the music industry, it would have been so easy for Giant Killers to go the route of many of their contemporaries and become what is known, I believe, as a heritage band. They could have hit the stage playing all the old hits, the tried and tested crowd pleasers, and taken the easy option as minstrels in the gallery, singing to the choir, preaching to the converted…pardon my tangled web of mixed metaphors.
It is to their credit that, having finally managed to release Songs For Small Places, last year, The Boy Who Went Delulu and Other Stories is a four-track stepping stone between this glorious return and a second album of original material. Not for them the resting on laurels, there is work to be done.
The title track, which greets us, proves that they are masters of their craft, their craft being to make the sort of deft indie music that seems to have been lost along the way. It runs on rock energy, indie cool, and power-pop accessibility, reminding us that such music used to have both fantastic riffs and grand narratives rather than just moaning about things and bopping around to off-the-shelf studio samples. Again, there is something here, indeed, as the chorus lifts the song out of the verse, that reminds me of the too short-lived Liberty Horses, a reference point that I am probably going to be throwing around for the rest of their career…and that is a good thing, nay, a great thing.
“Standing on A Ledge” blends hushed vocals and cascading guitars reminiscent of Lightning Seeds, “Soho Story” is a gorgeously understated piece built of bubbling beats and shimmering shards of guitar, and Hope Our Love Lives is the sort of glorious and life-affirming song that The Beautiful Sound would probably pay a small fortune for.
It is admirable when a band returns to the fray and continues moving things forward, but then, when you write songs this brilliant, this accessible, this inventive, this refreshing, and this benchmark-raising, why would they not?
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