Album Review: Pillow Queens, Name Your Sorrow

“Let’s just play some rock and roll music,” Pillow Queens suggest in the first verse of album opener ‘February 8th’. And then they deliver: mark my words, this is a superb guitar record, reminiscent at times of the cyclone sonics of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Elsewhere, it sounds similar to the languid cool of Death Cab for Cutie, or the neo-psychedelic punk of The Soft Boys.

By the time the listener reaches the addictive kung fu howls at the end of ‘Like A Lesson’, the album is purring like a Jaguar, a match for the Chevy roar of the record, last year’s marvellous outing from boygenius.

That’s lofty praise – but for me it’s more than warranted. Name Your Sorrow is produced by Collin Pastore, once of the boygenius parish, and like Phoebe Bridgers and co., Pillow Queens incorporate Springsteen and Replacements influences, never more so than on lead single ‘Gone’, which blends those two poles majestically. That’s no easy task.

However, you can sense that a shedload of painstaking work went into shaping Name Your Sorrow, each track being – in the best possible sense – a Frankenstein-ian composite of sounds, masterfully stitched, sewn or woven together. Whether it’s the prowling drums on ‘Suffer’; the hazy vocals and searing lead guitar on ‘Blew Up The World’; or the static rumblings that conclude ‘Notes On Worth’ – every detail has been scrupulously pored over and finessed accordingly.

Now that we’re well into April, thoughts invariably turn to festival season. I heartily advocate making this superb record part of your summer soundtrack.

9/10