SONG: "Nazanin" - Good Shoes (Think Before You Speak, 2007)

I’ve been really digging Good Shoes of late, a band who’ve been unfairly overlooked in the unending procession of fly-by-night indie acts to have emerged in the last couple of years (perhaps as a consequence of their moniker’s unfortunate resemblance to the infinitely less interesting Good Books). I first happened upon the band about a year ago when I found a promo of their debut single We Are Not the Same knocking around with a note scrawled on it that read: “Awesome, awesome intro”. The intro in question turned out to be an endearing square-off between the band’s two guitarists, who both play the same chord over and over at rapidly accelerating speed as if daring each other to brake first in an impromptu game of musical Chicken (I recently learned that a lad I went to school with co-directed the original video for the song, which you can view here).


A product of scruffy middle-class guilt and bored suburban malaise, the Morden quartet’s excellent Brille debut Think Before You Speak is one of the two best indie records of the year so far (the other being Make It Ride from London firebrands Vatican DC, who bosh together all the best bits of The Hives, Interpol and The Killers into one deliciously feisty package). The album is an instantly likeable effort bursting with zippy tunes that range from laconic, Arctic Monkeys-esque postcards of urban decay (Morden) to lovesick laments (Blue Eyes) and jaunty lounge which recalls The Strokes at their most lovably blasé (Small Town Girl).


There’s a beautiful sense of confusion to the music of Good Shoes, a feeling of perpetual blankness exacerbated by the disarmingly spiky bounce of the band’s bittersweet pop. More articulate than The Enemy, more incisive than The Holloways and way more fun than the slightly dour Kubichek!, oftentimes their songs are less clear-cut first-person narratives than cutting critiques of the pretenders they see around them: the ambiguity is such that you can never quite be sure if they’re singing directly about themselves or simply taking the piss. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the neurotic ramblings of All in my Head, a merciless dip into the diary of a no-mark who babbles: “I’m a talented artist, but my heart’s not in it / I’m a good shag, but I find nobody fits… / I play in a band, but I’ve got no talent / I spit and I drool, but I just don’t change a thing”. The freeform musings then assume a sloppy symmetry as they slide into a see-sawing chorus which traps the protagonist in a web of his own constraints: “It’s all in my head, all my hopes and my fears / And I’ve laid it out here for you all to see / But it’s all, all in my head”.


Indeed, there’s something quite poignant about the way Rhys Jones’s lyrics seem to directly mirror the experiences of being a young man attempting to get to grips with his own emotions, only to find himself repeatedly running up against a brick wall. Former single Never Meant to Hurt You is a fine example of this, offering up a kind of half-hearted apology to a former squeeze for whom his feelings were never more than fleeting (“Do you ever feel like you’ve broken someone’s heart? I do… / Do you ever feel like you’re lying from the start? I do…”). The listless modern equivalent of R.E.M.’s classic kiss-off The One I Love, the track is infused with muted melancholy: his sadness arises not from genuine grief, but from a recognition that his wrong-doing simply cannot be reconciled against that which he knows in his heart to be true (“I-I, never meant to hurt you / You, never knew I didn’t love you / I hope you’re fine, but the vote is mine / I’m so sorry that I’m such a typical man”). Despite his best efforts, Jones ultimately finds himself firing nothing but emotional blanks, despondent at his own ability to give as much of himself as he’d like but unable to achieve anything other than arrogant distance (“I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone…”)


However, it’s the album’s delightfully succinct opening track Nazanin which really floats my boat. As an actual song, there isn’t really anything to it, so it’s all credit to the band that they manage to make the track such a dynamic and fascinating listen. A loosely-concealed crib of various ideas from The Futureheads’ breakneck dancefloor classics Meantime and Decent Days and Nights, the track is a multilayered blast of staccato guitar which spins various motifs off one another while a single line repeats itself rhythmically in time: “All of my insecurities are summed up; when you walk into my…”. The lyric hangs tantalisingly in the air for about a minute or so; you can definitely feel it building to something, but you’re never quite sure what (eventually you’re completely wrong-footed when its conclusion is revealed to be “…when you walk into my room”: yet another example of personal inhibition made public in the frankest way possible).


Listening to the song closely, by the time its final proclamation rings out around the two-minute mark you can count somewhere in the region of eight separate guitar lines all playing off each other. Effortlessly eclipsing the dismal chancers plumbing a similar line in confessional clatter (from inexplicably popular chart-botherers Maximo Park to the hugely inferior Maccabees), it’s a superb opening to the album, a vibrant mini-firecracker of a song whose studied neuroses perfectly sets the tone for the tales of sexual and emotional inadequacy to follow.