Monday 10 November 2008

The Stills - Logic Will Break Your Heart

When I was on my Uni placement year in France, I was pretty starved of new music, so I started a habit that would go on to serve me well over the years to come, buying an album by a band I had heard of but never actually heard.

The first of what now amounts to dozens of this type of purchase was Logic Will Break Your Heart by The Stills. On first listen, it seemed like a pretty bleak piece of work (pretty ideal for someone who was hundreds of miles from home, actually!)

After a while though, something else starts to come through in the album. It's not exactly humour per se, but there's a sense that the dark mood around the record (largely wrought by a combination of Tim's brooding vocals and the Interpol-esque basslines) is masking a band who don't take themselves too seriously, in spite of all their talk of 'Massive suicide dreams'. Don't get me wrong, they're not We Are Scientists or anything like that, but I get the impression they aren't quite the miserabilists they might appear.

That The Stills' subsequent releases haven't yet quite managed to re-attain the heights of this record isn't really a surprise, because they set themselves a pretty high watermark here. In fact, they set a lot of people a high watermark, because Logic Will Break Your Heart is the benchmark for jangly guitar bands with menacing undertones.

Download: The Stills - Logic Will Break Your Heart

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU!!!!! Great album