(Muso's Guide, March 3, 2009)
Album review
Erudite, intelligent British bands with a nice line in self-effacement who know their way round lovelorn poetry. They’re a dying breed, and it’s a real shame, but rejoice, friend, because Official Secrets Act are here to swell their dwindling ranks.
Hailing from London village via Leeds university, OSA are a snazzy four-piece who know what a hefty debt their style of music owes to the 1980s.
Decked out in button-down Oxford shirts and waistcoats with side-parted mops atop their heads, their passing sartorial resemblance to Blaine and Stef from Pretty In Pink is not the only John Hughes invocation on display here.
Understanding Electricity is a record packed with songs which would gladly soundtrack any one of the swathe of ‘Bratpack’ flicks the erstwhile director ejaculated oh-so-many years ago.
From opener ‘Mainstream’, it’s an enjoyable daytrip through the musical merry-go-round of a really quite delightful bunch of chaps. “Faith, take me away/as far as you possibly can,” goes the lyric, vocalist Thomas Burke leaning on a little bit of Bolan meets Moyet, with a great selection of electronic bleeping in the backing. “John, you’re a hero/you’re a thief… Friday night is the only thing left to rely on,” speaks the voice of youth.
‘So Tomorrow’ canters along, instrumentally bound tightly by drummer Alexander MacKenzie’s stick work, while ‘The Girl From The BBC’ channels the sort of unrequited love that Jake Shillingworth made My Life Story’s stock in trade, darkly harmonious and Smithsian in its self-doubt, “I like her/She likes me,” the lyric offers simply.
On ‘Little Birds’, a tempo change offers a more introspective, melodic and stripped down sound. Burke is more Alex Kapranos on ‘Eleanor Get Your Boots On’, intoning the woeful, “You cry for the night to arrive and you cry for the morning“, before the pace picks up and a whole new song squeezes its way out of the speakers.
As far as album highlights, there are many, but for special note, check out ‘Hold The Line’, a radio-friendly piece of indie delight, all the pop punch of a breakthrough single. A complex guitar melody in no way detracts from a great lyric worthy of Hefner for its referential cultural comment and skewed love story element - “I like to watch her do these things/I like to watch her as she sings/ And as the world collapses around our ears/I play guitar to Tears For Fears“. It’s all you can do not to imagine John Cusack’s kooky high school loner leaping about his room with thoughts of the unattainable Ione Skye.
If you like the sound of yesterday, when we were all outsiders at the average American high school and wondered how Molly Ringwald managed to dress so well for so little, Official Secrets Act are a revelation.
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