Club Smith - Appetite For Chivalry

Yorkshire. With one word, you can picture York Minster cathedral, Leeds Festival, maybe even that guy from the Plusnet advert. It’s also famous for influential bands such as Pulp, The Human League, and even Gareth Gates. More recently it’s been churning out indie bands like a McDonalds kitchen, and the latest of these is Club Smith. Now these boys aren’t ashamed of their roots, so much so that their website title is ‘Club Smith – Band from York and Leeds’.

Now, as mentioned in the first paragraph, Yorkshire has a tendency to produce lots of bands. Two of these local boys done good, are The Sunshine Underground and The Pigeon Detectives, and this is where Club Smith seem to draw most of their influence from. That’s not to say that these are the only bands they strive to emulate, but there seems to be a larger than average dose in the mix. For The Pigeon Detectives see ‘No Friends Of Mine’ and album opener ‘Mantra’, and for The Sunshine Underground go for ‘The Green Room / Uh-Oh’ and new single ‘Lament’.

They do break out of their mould occasionally, but towards the end of the album, and in the words of mid-2000s pop-sensation JoJo ‘It’s just too little too late’. They go heavier with ‘Nonchalant’ and they piano ballad it up with the curveball ‘I Didn’t Want To Show You That I’d Lost Faith’, but these are rare moments where the band stray away from Yorkshire indie clichés. It isn’t all doom and gloom, and there are hints dotted around the record that this band actually possess something different from their fellow Yorkies. It’d be interesting to see the band work with a more experimental producer, as with a bit of encouragement, their future work could be much more exciting.

It’s hard to lay too much blame at their feet. It’s easy from the outside looking in onto a community of bands and say that they all sound the same, and it’s even easier to underestimate how difficult it is to break free from your local influences, just ask any band from Manchester or Liverpool, who were sick of references to Oasis and The Beatles before they even started writing music. It’s not a bad piece of work, it just doesn’t sound as fresh once a hundred bands have done it.