Long Live Life is the debut from Francobollo from Square Leg records. The album is a strong, if confusing, debut from the band and feels like a bag of ideas, and very good ones at that. It grabs your attention immediately from the opener ‘Worried Times’ which sounds very psychedelic, like a more rock-inspired Pond song. However, it ditches its ideas of psychedelics quite early on and changes into more of a gritty indie album further on.

The way it’s put together sounds very spontaneous; there are lots of different ideas and sounds on each song. Most probably don’t belong, but they make it work. The cover for the album is a good indicator of what you get; it’s a pastiche of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, set in space of course. It’s this kind of scattergun approach of ideas which makes this an interesting debut. Behind all the external stuff going on, at its core it is an indie-pop album. They’ve taken that template of indie-pop and disguised it with other ideas and themes. The only thing that is consistent throughout the album is the vocal, which is a good thing. It’s what makes all these ideas work: having one thing familiar throughout the album.

It’s an album which is recorded in a similar way to Love in the 4th Dimension by The Big Moon, in that it keeps a strong sense of production behind it but at the same time keeps the feel of a live show. It sounds loose and free and some of the ideas feel like they come out of nowhere but the recording is spot on and it sounds very well rounded.

Picking out tracks it’s hard to imagine them working on the same album, by the time you get to ‘Radio’ which is track eight it feels like a completely different album from how it started. For me it works due to the tracks in between. ‘USO’ and ‘Future Lover’ almost seem like they’re easing out the ideas of the first half of the record. I think the flow of an album is extremely important if you’re viewing the thing as a piece of art and in this case the flow is definitely there and works very well and justifies the huge mix of different ideas on the album.

Long Live Life is full of surprising and unexpected moments; this keeps it interesting however it can come across as a little confused and unsure of itself. It seems to try to pull off one too many different ideas and sounds, leaving us confused as to the band’s identity. There are great songs on there, however this mix of ideas doesn’t let much stick. The album is very enjoyable in the moment but the album does lack definition. There’s plenty of different and well executed moments on the album, it just doesn’t have a huge amount of staying power. I imagine that in a live context they will be brilliant and the things that haven’t clicked with me on the debut will work fantastically in a live environment. I’ll be looking forward to their live show in Brighton later in the year.

Chris Middleton

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