The Bloody Social - Sharpshooter EP (?)
4/5
By: Christiana Spens
"Your words are flying round my head like fire-flies - kick-start my high."
When I move to another city, it's usually because of a song. It's always because of a song. I just have to hear one song and next thing I'm booking a flight, packing my bags and moving on to the sound of something new, some old dream, some sound I cannot help but chase.
And I've been hanging round aimlessly somewhere in Scotland where the tunes are drying up and the bands all look the same. There just isn't enough going on and it's boring me too, too much. Yeah, so there's The View and similar, and Babyshambles if Pete bothers to turn up, but I can't recall anyone I'd actually chase round here. It takes something special to make me spark up and abandon all else just for an instinct. It was the instinct that made me randomly go to Basement Club one night the end of last summer (and become properly acquainted with Rockfeedback), the feeling I felt when I first heard the Libertines when I was fifteen. It's the kind of feeling that I have learned not to ignore.
So when I heard The Bloody Social, I breathed one long sigh of relief and tobacco smoke, that after all this trawling through pretty mediocre music I had found something real.
"Don't let me down - I've been running round cities just trying to hear the sound"
Couldn't put it better myself. You know you've found something when all the lyrics on an EP articulate completely all the fragmented thoughts that have been fluttering round your head and making you sick. It's like smoking a cigarette after giving up for too long. It's like falling in love with your big bad addiction all over again. All those other bands - they're like Nicorete Patches. They're just not enough.
So now that I've found The Bloody Social I feel much better. I've found the lust of the libertine all over again. I'm starting to wonder how I lived without them so long. We're going to look back on the past few years and call it The Void: that awful time in between the break-up of the Libertines and Now - when The Bloody Social set the air on fire. It'll be one of those times similar to rationing during the war, and we'll look back and think, How the hell did we get through it?
We got through it because we knew that sooner or later, there would be a band that would relieve our tired and dirty souls, there just had to be. And here it is. The Bloody Social. Maybe not everyone will agree with me. Well as they sing:
"I've been walking round this town, the dirty old place is bringing me down, and I don't care much anymore..."
Because enough people do agree with me. Word in New York is that they're beautiful, lyrically and physically. The lead singer, Jamie Burke, an Englishman in New York, (representing Great Britannia pretty well I'd say) is a notorious Casanova... The other band members are pretty hot, too. They're not called "Bloody Social" for nothing. But that's not the point. They have the sound and that's all that matters. They're playing rock and blues and they mean it. It's not some stupid ego-trip or fame-trail or pathetic little song of insincerity. All four songs on their EP are the real thing: yearning, lust, heartache, world-weariness, libertine insolence defiant as Victorian decadence, tales of debauchery, the deep low sultry voice of Jamie Burke, abandoned, lyrical, filthy, and yet comforting in a way I can't describe.
There are too many songs right now that are like a lick of an ice-cream, a kiss on the cheek, a wave in the street. They're not enough. They're not even close. At best they're a little tease of something more. But I haven't heard a decent tune in so long, and now, finally, I've found something that isn't shit, and I turn it up high, collapse onto my bed and take a deep drag of tobacco and rock 'n' roll - played like it should always be played, satisfying the insipid void that modern music had failed to fill until now... And I start planning another little trip to another big city, trying to hear that sound...
"Don't let me down, I've been running round cities just trying to hear the sound, she's breaking down, the city you're sleeping in can't stop weeping now... Oh baby, you're coming with me..."
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