Take three unlikely misfits from Wakefield near Leeds, a baseball cap, an old keyboard bought with a couple of quid at Cash Converters plus some charity-shop harmonies and you have the kind of frightfully friendly pick and mix pop that saw the Fiery Furnaces scale the dizzy heights of kooky anonymity and shaped the lives of John Shuttleworths everywhere. It’s a simple brief: instantly hummable tunes, a childlike grasp of arrangements and a brutal disregard for fashion. The result? A bright and breezy, bittersweet pop symphony, likely to leave you scratching your head and reaching for a bottle of Calpol.
Although it’s likely any person in their right mind will tire quickly of the perky cutting and sticking simplicity proffered by the likes of ‘The Way You Used To Smile’ and the joyfully inexpert way in which it’s all manhandled, it’s clear that Russell, Georgia and Sarah have carved a niche in a world dominated by aggression, for crafting weirdly adult-pop in a youth saturated market. The driving concerns of tracks like ‘I Love You But…’ and ‘Lonely Hearts Still Beat The Same’ may amount to little more than pokes and smokes down the shopping-precinct but the reassuring simple manner in which these songs are executed strips the usual pretensions of rock to their core issues: we’re young, we don’t know anything about love and breaking-up with your girlfriend is the worst thing that could possibly happen in life. Sounds easy? Well imagine a child of six trying to articulate the hormonal demands of the young-adult in syllables no greater than three. The success of ‘Breaking Up’ is in its ability to make the simple issues of the heart no more complex than a kiss and a grope behind the bikesheds. And its genius is that its taken pop forty-years to remember this.
Welcome to the primary school of rock. Devoid of flick-knives. Devoid of pretension. Past pupils include The Auteurs, The Boy Least Likely, Animal Collective, Television Personalities, New Pornographers, Fiery Furnaces and the mighty Jilted John.