Brakes - 'I Can't Stand To Stand Beside You' (Tugboat)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Audioslave flopped. Velvet Revolver look incredible but so far lack any proper tunes. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young... well, precisely. Someone needs to give supergroups a good name. Brakes could be those people.
Declaring themselves 'Brighton's answer to Velvet Revolver', Brakes (not The Brakes, just Brakes - got it?) number Eamon from British Sea Power, Mark from The Tenderfoot and both Tom and Alex from The Electric Soft Parade. On paper, it should be a great record. On CD, it lives up to that promise - an unhurried, calculated riot, making use of a tune of killer simplicity and a bizarre, menacing jangle that will have you pondering its strangely addictive drawl long after its mere four minutes and peculiar b-sides (which actually sandwich the single instead of following it) have run their course.
'I Can't Stand To Stand Beside You', you see, could have painted the Brakes in a misleadingly dark light if it wasn't placed between a couple of amusing, little punk-rock ditties (the best being the Bush administration-baiting 'Cheney', with its sole lyric - 'Cheney, stop being such a dick'), 26 and 10 seconds in length respectively. There's a sense of humour to this so-called supergroup, yes - but far from novelty, as the title-track proves, it's an invitingly dark one.
Artists in this article: Brakes
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