News Parties

As a shy kid, locking yourself away in your bedroom and listening to the collection of CDs you’d ordered off the internet, it’s tempting to think that confidence is overrated. But when you see the bluster and banter that is Brother managing to get on the front of the NME and support Morrissey, the penny starts to drop that having a bit of self belief can make up for any kind of deficiencies in your humdrum, lad rock sound.

Parties are a band that have confidence, but of a different kind. Most bands looking for press are prone to sending out long, dawdling emails about their background, their influences, that time they once was given the thumbs up by Brian Eno across the room at SXSW. For Parties, their pitch starts and ends with a link to their SoundCloud page – simple, yet brutally effective, with not even a name to sign the email off.

The tracks themselves – two of them in total – aren’t quite so lean, bringing to mind the not-so-distant past. The band members, however many of them there are, clearly spent 2006 in the same indie club nights as the rest of us, dancing to the better end of the landfill spectrum and drinking cheap rum and cokes. But whilst they’ve kept that same jangly formula that made The Maccabees and their ilk so eye catching, they’re dressing it up with tropical flair, using whatever the lo-fi equivalent of steel drums are to make the track infinitely more interesting than anything the brit-pop revivalists are trying to peddle.

Of the two tracks, it’s ‘Say Something’ that best sums up what the band do right, rejigging a genre that has long since sounded tired. ‘Happy Birthday’, their other effort, sounds more like what Les Incompetents might’ve produced if they’ve carried on going – alright, but nothing particularly special. It’s a great start, though and maybe if that succinct email gets to the right people in the right places, someone could have a word with Morrissey and convince him not to ruin any shred of dignity he had left by letting Parties open up his next tour for him rather than those dicks from Slough.

Say Something by Parties