Good Shoes: 'No Hope, No Future'
Young, easily digestible exponents of the latest sound, Good Shoes have ingratiated themselves with the right set to enjoy a good balance of popularity and acclaim.
The title of this album just screams youthful despair and is accompanied by a cover photograph of a swimming pool that could be from your own school.
One of the interesting elements of youth is the significance of place that can be so pronounced as to render almost every experience instantly nostalgic. Articulations of this experience are rare and beautiful. Two songs here orient the album toward a reflection on this kind of experience. On 'Do You Remember', singer Rhys Jones is on a train from Brighton to Clapham, dealing with a hangover and an agitation that seems connected to romance, drugs or both and is easily conjured up by the spiky music. The chorus slows down into a smoother lament about ‘all the things that they said but which never came true’. This is surpassed by 'Our Mother In A Pink Diamond', a marvellously fraught rock track that balances tense guitar contours against the touching description of a return to scenes of a (recent?) childhood.
The band are not always so competent. 'I Know' is clear evidence that the poetic is something mysterious, a process of saying exactly the right thing in precisely the right way, and that when our thoughts build up too much, the result can be a like a bottle neck of well-intentioned but embarrassing verbosity. Rhys Jones has a message built out of agreeable ideas, but it is very likely that the pop song is not the place for them. Stumped for scansion and resigned to a Dylan-esque angry torrent, Jones attempts to prise his perfectly valid but ultimately boring opinions into a hopelessly wasted three minutes. Equality, religion, atheism and hypocrisy are all given a cursory airing in the manner of someone who thinks they are the first person to realise something.
It is such a contrast to the affecting and light hearted 'Way My Heart Beats'; the first song on the album employs the slightest rise in intonation to create a nifty little chorus that emulates the shortness of breath caused by a cardiac arrhythmia. Jones’ lovelorn lament is adolescent through and through, but that catchy hook takes you back to the breathlessness he is trying to invoke.
'No Hope, No Future' is a mixed affair, ranging in quality as rapidly as the pitch of a teenager’s voice. Occasionally derivative but frequently energetic, it charts the continued maturation of a British rock group on the cusp of finding their own voice.
Released on 25th January 2010 by Brille,
Written by Huw Green.
