Screaming Lights - Like Angels [Album]

Anti-records

It should be an exam question right? "The Beatles have destroyed Liverpudlian popular music in perpetuity. Now discuss". Whilst almost every X-Factor wannabe (and that also means YOU, Victoria Hesketh) has fond childhood memories of boggling "Please Please Me" into a hairbrush, for sons of the Mersey it's seemed reverse etiquette to stick to quiet fury and minor key dissonance ever since 'God Save The Queen.'

For a group just out of school, emerging scouse quartet Screaming Lights seem remarkably absorbent; the PR blurb talks about them gestating in "Gloriously out of step" conditions, but "Like Angels" quickly reveals that if anything, the reverse is true. Frontman Jay Treadell - peroxide of hair and impressively unphotogenic - is also able to bend his self possessed charisma around material both gritty and elegiac, with authentic feeling, early 80's atmospherics which you assume he derived from YouTube and educated guesswork.

Protestations of insularity not withstanding, there was never any chance that thirty years of their alma mater's musical history could be ignored, and all of "Like Angels'" numerous better moments can draw a line of descent straight back through Degsy, Kenny and Yosser. Proof? For the chilled synthesizers of 'Rainmaker' feel the Wild Swans DNA, do the same for 'Champagne Socialist' and The Coral's quilted psychedelia, whilst 'Glow' provides a reminder that Cast were once credible competitors to Blur and Oasis. So far, the harsh might say so copyist. It should be noted though that all the use of this heritage isn't mimickery but ingredient, influences - although more intriguingly there's also a nod to the city which stole Liverpool's prosperity, with 21st Century evoking New Order in their Brotherhood pomp.

It's testament to the speed at which that beast called "indie" has moved in the last eighteen months that "Like Angels" has already been dismissed in some quarters as a by-the-numbers exercise, when compared to your average Pigeon Detectives record it sounds like - well, Rubber Soul for example. It also looks like the age of the career band seems to be rapidly drawing to a close for iPod children, the "Difficult" album now being whatever the next one you have to make is.

Predictions of success are impossible in this brave new world, so enough to say that Screaming Lights have made a record which will probably mean that a job doing admissions to the Beatles Experience will have to wait. For now.