Chapel Club ‘TBA’ // First Listen

Chapel Club
‘TBA’
(A&M)

Since forming in the summer of 2008, Chapel Club have been creating and hiding behind a smog of post-indie noir in their native east London. Led by frontman Lewis Bowman’s elegant prose and the tumultuous churn of Mike Hibbert’s guitars, their debut album is yet to be titled, but it is due out in January. JJ Dunning gives a track-by-track guide…

‘Intro’
‘Intro’ eases Chapel Club’s debut into stride with an eerie minute and a half; a slow fade-in of loops and backwards cymbal crashes. It’s an austere ramp up to the opening bassy thuds of ‘Surfacing’.

‘Surfacing’
“Strange, the god of your name is parsi in two/Shells and silvery scales and torrents of blue” begins singer Lewis Bowman, and immediately we’re party to Chapel Club’s knack; the balance between melody, darkly swirling music, and the poetic dexterity of their frontman. In the first quarter of the song – and again in the verses – Bowman skilfully builds an atmosphere using nothing but half-conjured imagery and tantalising silhouettes of characters, so that when ‘Surfacing’’s choruses nick the words from The Mamas And The Papas’ ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’ wholesale, both elements of the song are set neatly in opposition. It’s a meeting of the borderline pretentious and the universally recognised. A cleverly concise, brilliantly black-blooded guitar-pop song.

‘Five Trees’
Distant, turned-down My Bloody Valentine-isms squirm about the background, waiting for their moment to lurch into the limelight when the chorus comes around. Out front Bowman surfs a tide of bright keyboards and urgent drumming, crooning “Dust in my heart/Dust in my veins/I strayed too far into a dream”.

‘After The Flood’
An earthy, hypnotic bass ushers in ‘After The Flood’, with Lewis mournfully painting a landscape over the top, “The pines hung like reconsidered suicides/from the red palms of mountainsides”. Guitar and drums creep up on the intro, gradually increasing in volume, until Lewis sings “It doesn’t matter, It doesn’t matter” and falls away from the mic to make room for the swell of noise.

‘White Knight Position’
Ah, the chess metaphor. Initially a beefier, guitar-scape version of ‘Six’-era Mansun, ‘White Knight Position’ traverses drum patterns into a racing chorus that howls mysteriously about “twilight incisions”. Lewis really sounds surrounded by the band, making this easily the most claustrophobic moment on the album. Perhaps the intensity of it all serves as an explanation for what’s coming next…

‘The Shore’
Beginning with the sound of waves on a beach and some seagull squawks, ‘The Shore’ signals its intention to be the album’s first ballad. Indeed, the first minute or so conjures a few notions that they’re out to imitate The Smiths at their most melancholy. As ‘The Shore’ reveals itself, however, the chorus rises out of the low-key beginning and shimmers high in the clouds, before sinking gently back beneath the waves without causing so much as a ripple; all of which makes it feel less like a stretch of beach and more like an entire coastline.

‘Blind’
Another gently churning tumult of guitars shimmer, and we’re again faced with Lewis’ excellent lyricism. This time he appears to deal with love found and lost: “Where to begin/this snake has left us with last year’s skin/eyeless diamonds of a life that’s been and gone/memory is blind/Where did it end/we fell together like an accident/two lives colliding like continents/there’d be mountains between us in time.” In the final third, the guitars fall away briefly, only to reappear majestically, helping the outro to soar.

‘Fine Light’
To start with, ‘Fine Light’ is a choir of iridescent reverb and kick-drum. Over the course of its 5-minutes, however, it builds into the most frenetic song of the album so far, with twisted guitars freewheeling and colliding to make a cacophony of neo-noir noise.

‘O Maybe I’
The second single from the band is closest to ‘Surfacing’ in its pop sensibility; there’s balance between the radio-friendly, dark-hearted melody that drove that song, and the feral noise that swamped ‘Fine Light’. Cleverly, Lewis’s thinking-out loud monologue shifts uneasily – questioning fidelity, altruism and sanity – from one chorus to the next. The first goes like this: “O maybe I/should settle down to a quiet life/O maybe I/should chance it all on a perfect night”, while the final has seedier aspirations; “O maybe I/should take a bite while the fruit’s still ripe/O maybe I/should fuck around with someone’s wife”. It’s a coming of age anthem, essentially.

‘All The Eastern Girls’
A bombastic riff fires off two rounds, then stops, leaving Lewis, the bass and some shimmering synth sounds. “I’m sold out in every department/got nothing left for the world/eyes won’t adjust to the light/of all the eastern girls/they arrive like a King’s pardon” he laments, before the thump of the bass drum propels the album’s most memorable chorus: “Only just getting to know you” he sings.

‘Paper Thin’
Lewis again takes the spotlight as ‘Paper Thin’ gently spins into life, again armed with more lines of delicately gilded verse. “The archangels wings are still bleeding” he sings, setting a scene of mournful sunset with a “lavender sun”. On this, the album’s final track, the instruments, too, seem content to let proceedings sink gracefully into slumber. Poetically, you couldn’t wish for a more fitting conclusion.