Palace

By their own admission, Chapel Club couldn’t have picked a worse moment to begin their campaign for world domination. With a gloom-pop sound rooted in the early 80s, their debut album arrives just as British music is experiencing one of its periodic violent reactions to guitar music. Dub-step and potty-mouthed r’n b is where the zeitgeist currently resides across the channel, leaving Chapel Club uncomfortably out of synch with the times. They don’t seem terribly worried. In interviews, frontman Lewis Bowman has stated that, far from seeking to emulate Editors, White Lies etc the group regard themselves as London’s answer to The National, a grown-up affair whose appeal may only become obvious by their fourth or fifth album. You can see the wisdom of trying to dampen expectations ahead of Palace, a record which only intermittently rises above the mediocre. There are two fantastic singles: ‘Surfacing’, which lifts the chorus from ‘Dream a Little Dream Of Me’, and the majestic ‘All Eastern Girls’. Elsewhere, however, too much of Palace sounds like angst-pop auto-dial. It’s funny Bowman has chosen to disparage White Lies in print – for all his protestations they are the band with which the Londoners have most in common.