The trouble with ripping up the rulebook on your first release is that it leaves you with bugger all things to tear up and scrap with your second. Or so you’d think. Whilst the band’s blogger endorsed debut album, ‘Last Exit’ featured the crazy stuttering influence of Timbaland and UK garage pushed up against a wall of nerdy eighties synth-music, new album ‘So This Is Goodbye’ wrestles free of its urban grip and slips down an adjacent alleyway of dreamy, hypnotic vapour-pop, tearing a page from another rulebook that it just so happened to be carrying.
Newly signed to Domino Records (home to the Arctic Monkeys, Four Tet, Franz Ferdinand, Stephen Malkmus, The Kills – everyone remotely fabulous and cool) Jeremy Greenspan and Johnny Dark formed the Junior Boys in 1999 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, having blogged their way onto the airwaves through a mixture of word of mouth and a less than ambitious four track EP that was remixed by celebrated Austrian experimentalist, Christian Fennesz.
Furrowing a similar electronic brow to the likes of the UK’s Hot Chip and still making pleasing references to all manner of eighties chart acts like Soft Cell, OMD, Ultravox, John Foxx, Depeche Mode, Vangelis, Japan, John Foxx, Frazier Chorus and Blue Nile, ‘So This Is Goodbye’ sees the boys curling their tonsils and their synthesizers around a log fire of luscious arrangements and languid tempos that peak with the irresistible laments ‘When No One Cares’ and ‘FM’ – both of which manage to sound like Prefab Sprout’s ‘When Love Breaks Down’ as rejigged by Kraftwerk and remixed by Fridge.
Lyrically the album’s casual obscurity is offset by a contemporary setting of shopping-malls, hotel lobbies, radios, newspapers, cars, roads, mardy girlfriends and losing out to men with brighter stars and larger penises, an approach which arguably rescues it from simple atmospherics on several occasions. In short, fans of New MOR acts like Jay Jay Johansson and Jimi Tenor are likely to think all their Weihnachtens have come at once.
Definitely another prospect for our end of year Top 10 that begins and ends with D records.