Foxes! - Foxes!

Oh good golly! A husband and wife partnership. Records called ’46A Appleside Drive’ and ‘[email protected].’ That exclamation mark. Foxes! are as twee as a Los Campesinos! breakfast club and that’s just the icing on the cake. Like their chirpy others clattering around with saccharine vigour, Foxes! know their way around a catchy melody and chorus; yet the Brighton quartet’s take on Belle & Sebastian / C86 infused pop soon turns a sweet tooth into a tooth ache. Singer Kayla Bell irritatingly sulks about ‘Alex Badamchi’ voting for “Borderville in the battle of the bands,” but it’s more “ARGHHHHHHHHHH!!!” than “Awwwwwww.”

It’s ‘Foxes!’ try hard wit that’s the most off putting. They have a right old jamboree on the gypsy-folk scuffle of ‘Oh Rosie’, and after urging the old gal to get herself on the internets, Kayla and husband Adam bemoan about “Ruthless corporations that trample on our lives.” Yeah, capitalists are well bad! On ‘Art Girl’ – pleasantly borrowing from Mystery Jets’ ‘Young Love’ – Mr Bell exclaims: “But the expressionist in me knew / I’ve gotta take the post-modern view.” Meanwhile, the 8-bit Nintendo pop of ‘It’s Ridiculous Adam’ is oddly out of place and delivered with all the exuberance of the trademark album filler.

There are some promising moments though. ‘A Letter Of Mine’ resembles Johnny Marr’s trademark jangles, whilst ‘6 O’Clock’s themes of unemployment and stagnant isolation wouldn’t half fail to put a grin Mozza’s face. Not ones to ruin the moment though, ‘Descartes’ deals with lost love, death and er, how their “Dog got anal cancer from bumming around.” Charming.

Few graces aside, Foxes! take almost every trick in the book and nauseatingly sugar dump them back out. If Los Campesinos! moved elegantly forward with ‘Hello Sadness’, ‘Foxes!’ are clumsily tripping around.