Music Review

22 November 2008 12:45 BST

Futureheads: This Is Not The World

Nul Records, out May 26th.

In a nutshell...

Mackems are doing it for themselves

What's it all about?

Like Manic Street Preachers Everything Must Go (recorded in the wake of the disappearance of guitarist/talisman Richey James) or Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear (which chronicled the breakdown of his first marriage, to Anna Gordy), This Is Not The World looks destined to be an album which is forever inextricably linked with the circumstances that inspired it's recording.

The deafening silence of commercial indifference that met their second album News And Tributes in 2006 saw the Futureheads' record label dropping them like a hot potato filled with polonium-210 before Christmas had hit.

Yet far from the disaster that being told to collect your coat on the way out by your label traditionally is, t'Heads saw it as a artistic spur. The band talk of having become as creative as a copy of Guitar Hero on 679 Recordings, a Warner Music Group offshoot, and how their muse was reawakened by their corporate kicking. The only problem was that they now had no way of getting their revitalised visions to the public. Enter Nul Records – the Futureheads own record label and what they hope will be yet another rusty nail in the music industry's already inescapable looking coffin.

Who's it by?

The Futureheads post-punk jitter pop was forged in the furthest frozen and God forsaken corner of old Albion, where the natives communicate in a dialect alien to most ears and face the hostile conditions clad in nought but short sleeves. Or Sunderland as it is traditionally known.

Singing guitarist Barry Hyde, bassist David 'Jaff' Craig and guitarist Ross Millard all met at college in their home city. Naming themselves after the Flaming Lips' album Hit To Death In The Future Head and playing their first gig in 2000, it wasn't long until Barry's younger brother Dave replaced Peter Brewis, later of Field Music, on drums.

Releasing their first single in 2002, their eponymous debut album followed to much critical slobbering in 2004. When their ballsy reworking of Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love reached and breached the top ten a year later, it looked like t'Heads were about to hit the big time... until the dark, difficult and more developed sound of second album News And Tributes landed another year on.

As an example...

"Today I don't feel so ill/If only I could find the time/I want to kill." – The Beginning Of The Twist

"If I hear one more person talking about these days/Saying it's hard in this day and age/I will explode." – Broke Up The Time

Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys

While This Is Not The World is easily the Futureheads' most confident, cocky and commercial album to date, it still takes a night-out-with-Amy-and-Pete-not-ending-in-arrest-or-addiction sized stretch of the imagination to believe that our Stateside cousins will embrace the Mackem inflections, XTC-indebted judder rock and subtle sartorial manner of the Wearside wonders to such a degree that they wind up on a red carpet.

What the others say

"It's not that the Futureheads' third album is in any way bad. There won't be a more energetic record released this year, and several of the songs are jerkily, stubbornly likeable, but no new ground is covered." - Jaime Gill, BBC

"This Is Not the World is hardly an effort to stay afloat. It's the sound of a band who have regained their freedom and reinvigorated their passion for making great music." – Melissa York, Subba-Cultcha

"This time around... the song writing is more purposefully considered, at the same time capturing the raw burst of energy that spirited the band onto the world stage in 2004." – Jack Langridge, Gigwise

So is it any good?

After playing to thousands of people at Radio 1's Big Weekend in Sunderland in 2005, only to subsequently find that those thousands of people were not camping outside their local record emporium to buy the moody, mature and complex News And Tributes, it was easy to surmise that what the great unwashed were expecting from the Futureheads was not an album based on hard bop jazz time signatures and dedicated to the 1958 Munich air disaster, but an album's worth of Hounds Of Love.

And to a certain degree, This Is Not The World goes some way to belatedly meeting those expectations. It is, by some distance, the Futureheads' straightest, most accessible album to date, but don't be fooled by that – after all, giving the public what they want has never done the Stones any harm.

This Is Not The World is the crisp and invigorating sound of a band that has rediscovered the simple joy of making music again. That may sound cheesier that an aged Gouda, but when the clanging, chiming riffs of The Beginning Of The Twist pummels your eyebrows off your face, it is difficult to disagree with.

Think Tonight and Broke Up The Time follow in a similar vein, the latter as close as this album gets to their debut, but having had an amphetamine espresso enema to kick start the day. Hard To Bear's cascading beats and invigorating melancholy see The Futureheads enter the realm of the anthem for the first time with much success, and Radio Heart is as radio-friendly as they are ever likely to be, whilst still managing to sound more vital and innovative than the likes of the Kooks could ever hope to be.

If there's a minor quibble to be made of This Is Not The World, and a minor one it is, is that it does not match either their debut or its ill-fated follow up for depth or inventiveness. But with the Mackem quartet now captains of their own ship, there is hopefully no chance of these Futureheads being hit to death anytime soon.

8/10

Kelvin Goodson