Dumb - Club Nites

Like Vancouver’s answer to Parquet Courts, Dumb deal in spiky, rattling riffs and the kind of vocal - courtesy of frontman Franco Rossini - that lands somewhere between pissed-off rant and sarcastic stand-up. There’s a strong line of bands coming through that deal in ‘this sort of thing’, from New York’s Bodega to Amsterdam’s Canshaker Pi, but on second LP ‘Club Nites’ Dumb state a decent case for their place among them. ‘Beef Hits’ is an infectious, two-fingers up romp through twanging guitars and a big fuzzy chorus, while the Stephen Malkmus-recalling ‘Cursed’ shows they can do pranged-out melancholy just as well. Far from the fools of their name, Dumb are onto something pretty magnetic.