Favours For Sailors - Furious Sons

(Muso's Guide, March 17, 2009)

Album reviews

One can only guess at what sort of bonuses Favours For Sailors are offering to seamen.

But when their music is as upbeat and glorious as this, who cares? A mini-album from a maxi-talent, Furious Sons couldn’t help but succeed, containing as it does the best feelgood hit of the non-summer, ‘I Dreamt That I Dreamt That You Loved Me In Your Dreams’.

A gorgeous pop single, it turns out to be a sensationally good pick to trail the wonder of Favours For Sailors, perfectly reflecting as it does the poppy, sunny, essentially Weezer-ness of what it is that Favours For Sailors have to offer. Opener here, ‘Erode My Empire’, is certainly showcasing the good side of tunesmiths like Weezer before they lost it, starting out with a melodious guitar part which cannot be derailed by a hollered “BOOM!”.

An enthusiastic vocal from frontman Jon covers the disappearance of one man’s land thus; “Empires erode from the coastline in/And I’ll be left in a square metre in the middle/Probably in Nottingham”. ‘No Room At The Buffet’ is POWER POP, holding back no capital letters. The sweet harmonies are there again, something like Silver Sun from back in the day, and with a guitar part informed by J Mascis’ classic on Dinosaur Jr’s ‘Feel The Pain’, it is a standout track and no mistake.

All of Favours For Sailors’ songs seem to be over too soon - although the flipside of that is that they leave you wanting more, always an enviable position to be in. ‘The Nihilist Prays’ is just such a song - a nicely complicated musical arrangement with with requisite melodic harmonies.

On ‘Shy Times’, a skittery pop song with dance pretensions, the skill is in the vocal, paying more mind to Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci than anything else and leading to a punchy, interesting chorus. Finishing up on ‘Our Name’, Furious Sons does something quite insane for the first 20 seconds, offering a set of swollen strings for the intro sounds more suited to Kanye West’s latest single release than in this arena of tuneful indie pop.

The pomp gives way to well-judged chart-friendly pop goes some way to explaining the boy’s unusual moniker. Starting off, “I was pushed from the cliff by a jealous man and his hands” and a nice chorus line of “oh ooh oh” which gets the foot tapping, giving way to “Even your lover’s come to save you/When you’re tied to a chair doing favours for sailors”.

So now you know. Ask yourself - what favours would you do for a sailor? With music like this at stake, the answer is; pretty much anything they favour they damn well pleased.