The Long Blondes - Someone To Drive You Home

Darlings of the indie fops and fashionistas, championed by the purists and loved by all throughout for what seems to have been an age, The Long Blondes aren’t your typical fast turnaround one-year-only artist. Having ridden the peaks and troughs of public opinion, praised for their singles and chastised for the sporadic quality of their performances on the live stage - have the country’s (former) favourite unsigned band come of age?

Guitars squeal as ‘Lust In The Movies’ opens sounding polished and confident. The Long Blondes step up from the off; guitars purr with force while vocals demand you pay them attention before ‘Once And Never Again’ with what surely must be the best opening line of any song this year (Nineteen, you’re only nineteen for god’s sake/you don’t need a boyfriend’) jumps in. Re-recording the tracks which helped make you is always going to put some people off-side, but when you transform them to sound as rich as ‘Once And Never Again’ making the original seem meek in comparison, or like ‘Giddy Stratospheres’, sounding akin to the elder sibling of the original, assured and strutting, it’s bound to win over more than it dismays.

With the enticing vocals of ‘In The Company Of Women’, the delicate stripped-down and cleverly self-referential ‘Heaven Help The New Girl’, screeching vocals through ‘Separated By Motorways’ and with a dancefloor twirl built in on ‘Swallow Tattoo’, this is a debut album filled with self-assurance. Just when you think the ideas are running thin and routine predictability sets in during ‘You Could Have Both’, the track drops away to a duologue that hits hardest of all the self-questioning moments and sticks in the mind as the song plays out.

An album beautiful for all its lovelorn tales of paranoia and mis-treatment (‘He never has to go behind my back again/because I don’t speak to him now’), all swathed with an aura of identifiably British existence: the long winters, the motorways and the pessimism (‘all the men came back from six years fighting/to the beige row of houses and the prospect of spending/their Saturday nights in’ yet for all its cynical turns, ‘Someone To Drive You Home’ defiantly stands tall, proud, and ready to take on all comers.