Music Review: The View - Which Bitch?

A four piece from the granite city of Dundee in eastern Scotland, The View first emerged in 2006, garnering a reputation for ecstatically received and occasionally violent live performances and releasing two of indie-rock's staple records of the year, the proudly rockist "Wasted Little DJ's" and the anthemic "Superstar Tradesman". Fronted by the angelically featured Kyle Falconer - whose Caledonian burr was obstinately undisguised - their debut album Hats Off To The Buskers accordingly reached number one in the UK album charts on release and the single "Same Jeans" was for a short time as inescapable as death and taxes. Essentially a distillation of youthful punk energy tinged with elements of scuzzy seventies blues rock, it was a record probably greater than the sum of its parts, but after a triumphant British tour which culminated in a celebrated hometown crescendo, rags to riches beckoned.  

Two years is a long time in the entertainment business. Now essentially a genre label as opposed to a means of distribution, independent music in Britain has seen wholesale changes in taste in the space of a few short months. Gone is the laddish, cloistered new wave that dominated the student disco since the emergence of the Arctic Monkeys, to be replaced instead with the noir romanticism of Glasvegas and White Lies or glam nostalgia of Empire of The Sun. The change was brought into startling relief when The Kaiser Chiefs - the poster children for the old order - saw their new album Off With Their Heads spend a mere six weeks in the top hundred, just months after selling thirty five thousand tickets for a concert in their Leeds birthplace. Band insiders talked of over exposure. In reality, the cycle had drawn to a close.

The secret of career longevity is reinvention. Take Blur, who undoubtedly created the short lived phenomena of Brit pop. Their 1993 album Modern Life Is Rubbish - with it's Ray Davies intonation and pensive art-rock homages - gave birth to the movement, and whilst they would subsequently then go on to define it on Parklife, they savvily recognized shortly afterward that the game was up. Rejecting the institutions they'd become, their eponymous fifth release saw the introduction of a different sound which owed much to the dork-ish nerdity of Pavement. Career time lines have significantly contracted since then. Whereas just a few years ago it was acceptable to record two albums of roughly similar material before striking out for new territory, artists in the iPod era have been reduced to continually shredding their modus operandi, changing each time they went into the studio just to maintain critical momentum.

Article Author: Andy Peterson

British. Thirtysomething. Passionate. Opinionated to a fault. Never less than everything. If you're at the edge of reason, you're taking up too much room.

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