Good Shoes...shiny and new

If you like Brit pop – and you do not live in the UK where Good Shoes are old news – why not check out this really above-average jagged-pop band.Here’s my review from Dusted a couple of days ago.Got room for another jittery, jangly, British band? Still hankering for one more passel of skinny boys with hair flopping in their eyes, singing mordant love songs and callow social criticism, while conjuring the ghosts of Orange Juice, Fire Engines and the English Beat? Did you somehow miss the Gang of Four overkill that followed Franz Ferdinand's runaway success, so that swooning pop braced with barbed and stinging guitars sounds fresh and new? Well, climb on board, because London's Good Shoes have another record for you, and it's quite good…if you're not sick to death of all this, that is. I’ve personally had a lengthy detox, and don’t mind the clank-clank-clank of woodblocks or abrasive bursts of guitar that launches "Nazanin," Think Before You Speak’s opening track. The whole song is hair-grabbing, head-banging distraction, evoking exactly the sort of brain spasm that ensues when a girl in a miniskirt walks by. The anxiety is palpable and almost pre-verbal, with the verse coming in only at the very end. Even then, it’s hard to think straight, and thoughts must be re-stuttered, repeated, revisited. "All of my insecurities…" rattles singer Rhys Jones, four, five, six, seven times, before he can even move onto the next phrase. "Are summed up…" By what? That'll take several more iterations and, in fact, won't come until the very last instant of the song. Because when Jones finally spits out "When you walk into the room," the band pulls up hard, slamming into the dead wall of the song's ending. It's short and sharp and fantastic, and its combination of angst and romance and short-circuited intelligence a harbinger of the rest of the album. More here: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4125Video of “All In My Head”