Bombay Bicycle Club - Flaws

Calling ‘Flaws’ a Bombay Bicycle Club record is misleading. It isn’t; not in that sort of way. We probably would have gone with Jack Steadman and Bombay Bicycle Club, because there’s a real sense that the new album makes him the star. His acoustic guitar is the album’s anchor, with very little in the way of contribution from the other band members - but this is entirely a good thing.

In fact, we can see this shift in sound doing the band a considerable amount of good. People who had them pegged as middle-of-the-road indie-pop upstarts will need to think again, for a start. They probably weren’t paying close enough attention to last year’s ‘I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose’, anyway. True, there were a number of songs on that album that came across as filler on initial listens, but it was these tracks that had the greatest impact when they finally clicked.

‘Flaws’ has been in the pipeline for quite a while, too. One of its highlights, ‘The Giantess’, indicated this new direction they would eventually take. Anyone thinking that the whole idea was, ‘Oh hey guys, let’s make an acoustic album for shits and giggles!’ would be mistaken. There was an almost imperceptible gap between the debut being finished and the start of the sessions for ‘Flaws’.

Bombay Bicycle Club are treating it as far more as a diversion before LP3, and so they should, because ‘Flaws’ displays confidence beyond the group’s years, well able to stand up on its own, yet also capable of avoiding comparisons to the debut because of its very nature; there’s another reason why this was a good move.

Like the debut, the melodies contained on the new album are its strongest point. Even the reworkings of a selection of older tracks sound fresh, their immediacy shining through even more clearly due to their bare-bones makeup. Intimacy is here in spades as well. Some of these songs are so brittle they seem almost at the point of shattering even as they’re heard, like the impossibly tender duo of ‘Leaving Blues’ and the John Martyn cover ‘Fairy Tale Lullaby’. The highlight here is ‘Ivy and Gold’, a song that can sit comfortably amongst the group’s finest work, its gentle percussion intertwining with a perfect melody to produce something majestic.

Closing with Steadman’s take on Joanna Newsom’s stunning ‘Swansea’, rejigged with an entirely new hook, and showcasing the frontman’s breathless vocals very well indeed, ‘Flaws’ is a gentle rebuke for those who had written Bombay Bicycle Club off after just one record. They’re just as comfortable with creating torch songs like these, as they are writing powerful, stadium-sized tracks. With sessions for the next album already underway, we can see that they simply do not want to keep still, or stay in the same musical territory for too long. Is there another reinvention on the cards? Let’s hope so.