Villanelle - Measly Means

While ‘difficulty’ isn’t quite the word – one imagines having some of the UK’s most celebrated musicians a mere speed dial away for any advice growing up would be anything but – there is something to the fact that, even if Gene Gallagher had lived his own personal ‘Yesterday’ and never even happened upon anything his Dad had ever put to tape,by sole virtue of fronting a guitar-bass-drums rock band post-1994, he’d garner the same comparisons. And, regardless of where on the nature-nurture spectrum one opts to sit, the occasional elongated vowel sound that emanates from him is likely entirely biology’s fault. 

So, to describe ‘Measly Means’ as post-Britpop may, here, be a little too close to the bone, it’s both to late-‘90s Britrock, and the decade’s earliest years that Gene – alongside Villanelle bandmates Ben Taylor and Jack Schiavo – in fact look: the gloriously menacing grunge of ‘Placebo’ and ‘Hinge’; the poppier take on the same style with nods to slacker in the opening title track, the hints of Stone Roses that emerge on the expansive ‘Opportunity’. It’s not a throwback, though; the twinkly ‘Squeeze’ shares much with the more emotional side to Fontaines DC’s output.

So yes, ‘Measly Means’ may - to many - introduce another nepobaby and its associated discourse, but it also showcases an exciting new rock band.