Peggy Sue – Acrobats
Wichita
Like esteemed release-day buddies Slow Club, Peggy Sue were once, in the innocent daze of 2009, to be found sharing stages with those chart-bothering sods amongst men Mumford and Sons. ’Them?’ you might be forgiven for asking. Yes. Yet — again like the Sheffield duo — Brighton’s finest folkies (sans ‘and The Pirates’ suffix, these days) have long since abandoned ship. What recording debut album Fossils and Other Phantoms in Brooklyn’s artsy DUMBO (aka Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) district fairly well ensured was the banishment of such unwanted expectations and associations. This not-very-long-awaited follow-up is somewhat closer in tone to Slint’s never-realised ‘feat. PJ Harvey’s Spiderland sequel, which effectively makes it to Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More what Mullholland Drive is to Bambi.
There is surely nothing accidental about ‘Cut My Teeth’’s standing as both album opener and taster; it is, weirdly, a dingy underpass of crawling guitar shapes and militant vocal chants, scurrying back and forth in the shadows. Where Laura Marling’s latest prances along the tractor-trails of tedious hoe-down tomfoolery, ‘D.U.M.B.O’ — which spins a potentially folksy jaunt into something solemn and stony — eerily ventures down the road less contrived, crying “I lost my name in the fire!” by way of introduction before breaking down into an off-spun, barn-collapsing instrumental chorus.
Not to tar it with the ‘better than something not very good’ brush — there’s much indeed to dig one’s teeth into here: guitars crunch like so many snail-shells underfoot , and dual vocals mingle awkwardly like an anguished kitten being dragged along a rough suburban pavement. If there’s fault to find in Acrobats, it’s with the threesome’s deceptively minimal setup, lyrical and instrumental, which walks a tightrope between subtlety and overcooked understatement, rarely pulling any truly remarkable shapes. But what this helps reveal is the often-shy, occasionally striking wordplay and imagery at work here: “Come away from the window, I’m afraid of what you’ll see / Leave what the future holds to be happy holding me,” taunts ‘Shadows’, as if failure to fulfil said request might result in our the narrator calling time on this myopic relationship in quaintly dramatic fashion — flinging herself, shrouded in white sheet, from the top level of a haunted Victorian manor, perhaps.
Elsewhere ‘Song and Dance’ will appease the twenty-somethings feeling lovesick for post-hardcore anklebiters Q And Not U with a warm flurry of chaos under control, as ‘Boxes’’ blunt barbs thrum on the tautest of heartstrings like weathered memories pounding against dull brick walls. And while 2009’s Fossils and Other Phantoms gave Peggy Sue a sound to call their own, Acrobats proves them a wonderfully unpredictable and tightly-wound conductor of influence, perhaps best filed next to The Horrors, instead of those other guys. Jazz Monroe
