The Slow Readers Club - The Slow Readers Club

Manchester’s The Slow Readers Club are an indie guitar band in the most traditional sense. As guitar music has fragmented into a mass of disparate influences and sounds, the traditional guitar band has become increasingly rare. The Slow Readers Club, however, remain admirably committed to making big guitar music full of widescreen ideals. Their’s is a sound very much redolent of mid-noughties indie music with strong echoes of the likes of Editors and The Killers at their gloomiest. Unfortunately, what would once have been lapped up by both the traditional indie press and the mainstream now sounds ever so slightly incongruous and the four piece’s self-titled debut album is a solid if unspectacular collection of electro indie guitar.

The album mines that age-old mix of combining big melodies and big chorus’ with downbeat lyrics and gloomy themes. The almost relentlessly doomy lyrics filled with portent, however, give the album an overpoweringly joyless feel. This is certainly not a light and breezy listen. The intense feel is ushered in on opening track ‘One Chance’, “A creeping cancer’s chewing at your bones” is just one sample lyric. As with most of the album the track builds to a stirring crescendo featuring a nicely swelling chorus.

Singer Aaron Starkies’ strident vocals, a strong stentorian croon, are the foundation upon which The Slow Readers Clubs, insistent riffs are based on and his voice dominates throughout. Singles ‘Sirens’ and ‘Feet On Fire’ are both invigorating pieces of pulsating indie rock, however, at times the album is hamstrung by a tendency to lapse into overwrought grandeur as evidenced on the string laden ’Follow Me Down.’ The band are far better when they stick to driving anthemic rock as on album highlight ‘All Hope, No Faith’.

Despite the Slow Readers Club’s debut suffering from an occasional air of functionality and perhaps being slightly two long there is still evidence of a real melodic sensibility here. The release offers promise that can be honed as they progress and refine their sound into something slightly more progressive.