Decoration - See You After The War
This is the second full-length release from the (very) English four-piece Decoration. Although the band have been touring and recording since 2004, I have to admit that receiving this CD for review was the first time that they had crossed my radar. And, all in all, I’m rather glad that they have.
This is an album full of songs that are both amiable and sincere. With a resolutely non-Americanised vocal, with the Northern English accent coming to the fore (and why the hell shouldn’t it?) right from the off in opening track ‘You’ve Been Busy’, they also use a nicely parochial vocabulary, singing of “plants in the bay window” (‘You’ve Been Busy’, again), and the likelihood of winning a BAFTA (‘BAFTA’), where they could have easily taken the cop-out option of an OSCAR (which would have fitted in the line just as well). Exclamations are often in a vernacular that makes it seem both authentic and genuinely meant, as in “I can’t believe I’m even saying this” and “I’m mortified” from ‘Glasshouse’, and the reference to having “been tangoed”, in ‘You’ve Got My Belts On Loan’. So far, so Wedding Present, and indeed the singer has a definite sound of David Gedge about him.
The subject matter here is often love, loss, heartbreak and so on, but what makes many of the songs more interesting than usual is the tangent from which these well-worn topics are approached. A possibly dying affair is likened to a disease-riven tree (‘Dutch Elm’), a tale of love and peer-group pressures is set in the world of youth athletics (‘Our Friends Don’t Mix’), a sheepish boyfriend appears to admit his infidelity while singing about his girlfriend’s political activism (‘Glasshouse’). That the lyrics, for the most part, succeed in not sounding over-contrived, or skirting ‘novelty’ territory, is to the band’s credit.
Songs seem to divide, loosely, into two types. Those that worked best, for me, were the more straightforward (musically-speaking) indie-jangle tracks, like ‘Dutch Elm’, and the lovely ‘Our Friends Don’t Mix’. Other tracks mined a more epic, swirly-guitared and sometimes bordering-on-overblown seam: ‘Square Mile’ and ‘All Over Glasgow’, for example. The instrumentation is principally of the guitar / bass / drum template, with occasional flourishes of piano on ‘BAFTA’ and ‘Disney On Ice’, and what sounds like a french horn on ‘Somewhere In The Western Approaches’. These are nearly all songs that merit repeated listenings I found that after a few listens most of them grew on me very much, in particular the standout ‘Our Friends Don’t Mix’ which combines the best of their lyrical smartness with a cracking get-under-your-skin tune.
To summarise, if well-crafted songs by emotionally literate young men of an almost old-fashioned indie persuasion are your cuppa, then you could do a lot worse than invest in this romantic yet down-to-earth release.