Ten City Nation - Ten City Nation

This debut album from the English three-piece is a return to rock’s original values, or at least before the likes of The Libertines transformed it felicitously in to an aesthetic of decadent dandyism. Here it’s all about good old teenage feelings, fits of melancholy, suicidal vertigo and incurable despair.

Ten City Nation’s many influences range from Nirvana to Queens of the Stone Age, and haunt them in their quest for violence and self-destruction. Mike Smith’s vocals often sound full of hatred and world-weariness, just like the best of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. The general feeling from the record is that it’s a fall straight to hell. But the band’s best quality is that they never lapse in to caricature. They’re next on the list of bands rediscovering and reinventing the rough qualities of music over recent years - Bloc Party, Sons and Daughters, The Kills.

With all these references, it’s impossible to suggest that Ten City Nation are about to revolutionise rock music, but they are excellent craftsmen with a rare sincerity. Opening track ‘Exhibition Time Again’, energetic and stark, sets the tone of the whole album: passionate, obstinate, frantic. And there is no way out. The pop-like break of ‘Wolves At The Window’ only prophecies a violence to come (as the title of the track actually indicates): behind the softness there is always something lurking in the dark.

The tracks here become incrementally obsessional, playing on ceaseless repetitions accompanied by steady riffs. ‘Skeletons’, after a beautiful instrumental introduction leads us to a psychotic maze where Smith reasserts, as if driven on by despair, ‘I’m not going to give it up’.

Ten City Nation manage to create a mood of their own, which is uncommon enough for a first album to be notable. Their moth-eaten darkness, their quest for disharmony, are evidence not only of their deep musical culture, but also of their radical talent.