MUSIC PREMIERES
“This is the fuckin’ biggest show of our lives,” says English Teacher frontwoman Lily Fontaine to a capacity crowd at London’s Electric Brixton. “This is rock’n’roll,” she continues, with the spirit starting to take over. “That rock’n’roll, eh?” now with an Alex Turner drawl, “it just won’t go away…”
The Leeds art-rock champs have every right to carry a little of that swagger of their Yorkshire indie peers tonight. The final night of their tour also happens to be the biggest headline show of their career to date, a victory lap for their universally acclaimed Top 10 album ‘This Could Be Texas’ – certainly one of the definitive debuts of the year, and perhaps one of the best of this decade so far. “There are quite a lot of you,” notes Fontaine, with the air ripe with a sense of occasion.
The show starts with the singer tottering on stage wearing one of the giant papier-mâché heads from the music video for ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’, accompanied by a fitting Lynchian soundtrack. Here’s a band that follow their own script. Their originality feeds their energy on all sides of the spectrum, from the jarring and rollicking ‘I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’ to when Fontaine takes to the keys for the beautiful ‘Broken Biscuits’
‘Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space’ ironically takes Brixton beyond the O-zone layer, while the intricate meanderings of ‘Mastermind Specialism’ keep the crowd enthralled without a whiff of being self-indulgent. “This is a love song,” says Fontaine, introducing ‘You Blister My Paint’. “We don’t have many of those, so excuse me while I get emotional”. And she does. In fact, she sings the absolute fuck out of it. “It’s about to get lairy,” she offers before ‘The Best Tears Of Your Life’, seeing in a series of wild peaks, complete with a spot of crowdsurfing for ‘R&B’; the band’s eccentricities never getting in the way of a good time.
We spot a nearby fan wiping the tears from their cheeks during a magnetic performance of the tender ‘Albert Road’, before Fontaine finds again that “dreams can come true” for a confetti rainstorm during the frenetic first set close of ‘Nearly Daffodils’. Returning for the encore of a wonkily gorgeous spin on LCD Soundsystem’s ‘New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’. It’s been a journey in just over an hour, leaving you desparate to know the band’s next destination.
“Where do you holiday?” shouts someone from the audience at one point. “I don’t holiday, mate,” Fontaine smiles back. “I work. I’m a bad bitch”. English Teacher have been more than vocal in the never-ending battle for artists’ hard-work to be valued and compensated. They’ve put the hours in, and tonight it pays off. They’ll clean up at festival season and if there’s any justice they’ll be at least nominated for the Mercury Prize. The year could very much belong to English Teacher – the band keeping UK indie very safely out of that swamp.
‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’
‘I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’
‘Broken Biscuits’
‘Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space’
‘Albatross’
‘Sideboob’
‘Mastermind Specialism’
‘You Blister My Paint’
‘This Could Be Texas’
‘The Best Tears of Your Life’
‘Nearly Daffodils’
‘R&B’
‘Albert Road’
Encore:
‘New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down’
MUSIC PREMIERES
SEVENTEEN slink into a gloomy, post-apocalyptic world filled with old school technology in the video for their Pharrell Williams-produced single “Bad Influence.” The 13-member K-pop boy band dropped the visual from their new HAPPY BURSTDAY album on Wednesday (June 11) and fans will surely be picking through the arresting clip directed by Beomjin for days looking for Easter eggs.
The video for the English-language single opens with the singers locked in reflective glass pentagons as they sing about wanting to have a good time while seeming like they’re not having one at all. After escaping from the enclosure, they get chased around a brutalist structure by robot dogs singing, “And I had time to think about it/ But life would be so much better without it/ I don’t want it at all/ But, hey, I wanna have a good time” over Pharrell’s insistent, fuzzed-out beat.
And while the song is about having a good time, the action makes it seem like that is a stretch. Dressed in Blade Runner-like leather jackets designed by Japanese fashion house sacai, they stand around while an unseen member plugs an analog cord into a headphone jack that reads “Good” as an old school dot matrix printer spits out the lyrics and a few of the guys ghost ride their old school muscle cars.
The sci-fi action takes a bizarre turn halfway through when they enter a red zone filled with white mannequin heads wearing blindfolds as one of the singer’s puts a checkmark next to “bad” on a checklist that includes “lost,” “sad,” “raw,” “happy,” “innocent” and other emotions. There is also an M.C. Escher-like stairway to nowhere, a bath in a swamp of vintage audio tape, contemplative posing on a pile of tires and moody standing around in dimly lit rooms in the dream sequence-like series of shots that leave more questions than answers
HAPPY BURSTDAY debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart, landing the group their seventh top 10-charting album.
Watch the “Bad Influence” video below.
