Bruiser

About

The Duke Spirit are a band you want to root for, blessed as they are with an alluring frontwowan (Liela Moss) and good taste (drawing on everything from 1980s UK indie to northern soul to murder ballads), but also a willingness to burnish those outsider sources with a considerable sass and swagger to bring the masses on-side. And yet, the masses have been mostly resistant to their charms-- the London group first surfaced in 2005 in the shadow of the similarly seedy but more widely celebrated Kill, while the ensuing years have seen upstart acts like the Joy Formidable emerging with more bombastic, attention-grabbing takes on shared noise-pop influence. The title of the Duke Spirit's third album would suggest they're tired of being relegated to second-class NME citizenry and ready to show the kids who's bo. But Bruiser-- produced by alt-rock spit-shiner Andrew Scheps-- feels oddly restrained, as the band sounds caught between the duelling desires to hold onto its grit-rock roots and to make its sound more sophisticated. The Duke Spirit have always attempted a tricky balancing act in their music--between the classic and the modern, the dissonant and the accessible, the decadent and the elegant-- but sometimes you wish they'd forsake this mode of controlled tension and give in to more extreme tendencie. Early singles "Love Is an Unfamiliar Name" and "Cuts Across the Land" weren't exactly textbook-definition rager, but they still possessed a certain thrust, swing, and vigor; by contrast, Bruiser salvos "Cherry Tree" and "Procession" are set to lumbering, mid-tempo backbeats that don't provide the band with much opportunity to catch fire and push the Duke Spirit perilously close to run-of-the-mill mid-2000s modern rock. (The pomped-up power ballad "Northbound" doesn't do them any favors in that regard either, sounding a few years too late for an O.C. prom-scene placement.) But if Bruiser's more straightforward rock turns mostly disappoint (one notable exception: the late-game adrenaline shot "Everybody's Under Your Spell"), the album does find the band showcasing its dynamic range in new and intriguing way, from the winning "Villain"-- the sort of sly, piano-rolled lullaby Nina Persson might've brought to a latter-day Cardigans or A Camp record-- to "Sweet Bitter Sweet", a solitary blues that blossoms into a theatrical show-stopper. Best of all is "Bodies", which makes great use of a stalking bassline and Moss' reverbed voice to set a grimly atmospheric scene, the creeping unease eventually manifesting itself into a powerful, almost stoner-metalesque surge. It's a rare instance where Bruiser lives up to its titular threat, but given this album's near-50/50 split between chugging rockers and elaborate, downcast balladry, it's safe to say that, at this point, the Duke Spirit are becoming ever more interested in cataloguing emotional wounds as leaving physical one. .

via Last.fm

The Clerk says

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