Track Of The Day NEW LABOUR
The South Australian musician and songwriter, based in Clare, Joel Carr, formerly known as English Summer, and briefly Arts & Letters, with a romantic, fanciful penchant for British independent underground sound from the 80s-early 90s, is dynamically involved, as a soloist or with like-minded co-conspirators, in plenty of endeavours, sometimes short-lived or name-shifting, such as, lately, The Boltons, Bedroom Holiday, Air Belgrade and New Labour.
With the latter two, of which the respective first albums were recently dropped via the brilliant Brest-based, French imprint Too Good To Be True, Caleb widens his sonic palette, rooted in the Creation and Sarah Records’ Jangle Pop aesthetics, to Factory Records’ Mancunian Post-punk elegiac grey mists and swirling New Wave glitters.
The latest single, titled “Tangiers”, by the usually synth-laden project New Labour, in collaboration with Salford’s based Susan Anne Messner, also part of the, I guess, largest band Air Belgrade, is a jittery and harrowing song, their most Dark Post-punk so far, about an unwanted child who suffers neglect and emotional abuse under the guise of love, where the early New Order and early The Wake, leanings unfold more stinging and edgy.
Hypnotic pattering beats, amidst discharges of scattering percussive hits, underpin insistent murky throbbings of rumbling moody basslines, sliced by sharp-edging guitar spatters injected with twitchy, jagged urgency, whilst late emotive keyboard backdrops depict drifting hopeless drama over haunted emotional vocals, releasing brooding anger into the eternal darkness of shame.
Keep up with New Labour:
