Metronomy – ‘Nights Out’

This week everything you read, no doubt, will be about Glasvegas; The Great White Hope Of British Music plastered everywhere in high contrast black and white, like there’s nothing else worth caring about. If you believe that, you’d be very wrong, as Metronomy just go to prove.

A second long player, but first as a three piece (Joseph Mount is joined by Gabriel Stebbing and Oscar Cash this time round), ‘Nights Out’ is arguably more accomplished but certainly a damn site more fun than it’s Scottish peer. After all, despite being a ‘half-arsed’ concept album about a rather uninspiring night on the tiles, it’s utterly brilliant for it.

There’s songs you’ll recognise (‘Radio Ladio’, ‘Holiday’ and ‘My Heart Rate Rapid’ all feature), and most recent single ‘Heartbreaker’ is especially brilliant, but the true strength is two fold. Musically ‘Nights Out’ is intricate yet mind blowingly effective in it’s simplicity at the same time, much as would be expected, but Mount’s emergence as a Really Rather Good vocalist is more of a revelation for a man best known by most for his remix work.

It’s impossible to put anything firmly in some neatly labelled box, with electronica and pop jousting with almost everything else you could possibly think of. Outside the obvious, ‘A Thing For Me’ is pure disco (though probably a rubbish one, given the album’s theme), while The End Of You Too’ shifts tempo like nothing you’ve heard before.

What’s undeniable is that Metronomy possess a certain strand of magic; one that proves that no matter what you’ll hear elsewhere there’s more than one reason to get excited this week, and some reasons may well be better than others.