Let's Get Worse

Let’s Get Worse (despite the crap title) is, in its own peculiar little way, as good a debut album to emerge from the North as anything since The Undertones.

Setting its cap firmly in the camp of mid-’80s widescreen indie (at times it sounds unerringly like a lost Martin Hannett gem), it has a self-assurance, and gentle surety of tone that, really, should only appear a few more records down the line.

Take ‘Florida Keys’ for example, an old favourite, but a beautiful, beautiful song that manages to make bedfellows of The Violent Femmes, Pixies and John The Baptist. Or the brooding ‘May Gold’, which has The Palace Brothers file adoption papers for John Squire – a creepy, back-porch ballad, suddenly invaded by the demented, inbred, local guitar hero who’s usually kept locked away in the woodshed.

Then there’s ‘Crown’ which, half-way through, mutates into (honestly) prime Lillywhite-era U2. Only with a Cushendun introvert singing over the top and not Bono. Not to mention ‘D.S.R’, ‘A New End’ and ‘Last Song’ – all tunes echoing with the kind of neglected classics (choppy Chronic Town-era R.E.M, the first side of Ocean Rain by The Bunnymen, New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies) that, at this moment, seem unbelievably open for plunder.

That a trio from Belfast has managed to do this is terrific. That they’ve also managed to stamp their personality the whole way through is cause for greater delight. These Hearts are on fire.