Yeah So (Deluxe Edition)

This limited edition features a bonus CD with rare tracks! "Musical compartmentalization is of course a bad thing more often than not, but it's increasingly an exercise in chasing one's own tail trying to work out where Slow Club fit in. They're not really twee, or indie, or folk, or anti-folk, or acoustic roots, but you can see how the confusion might have arisen. Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor's harmonies and summery faux-ramshackle approach is one that doesn't reach out for approval or, despite the album title, smug superiority but suggests in an implicit, low-key fashion that people discover them under their own steam. Which, with more than a couple of years' worth of singles and well placed support slots behind them, seems to be working out fine. The sound of Yeah So bears that gameplan out. Although the sound the pair make often clatters its way through in its enthralled excitement it never over-reaches itself. Like former tourmates Tilly And The Wall there seems a lot going on amid the gang shouts and unorthodox percussion but listen closer and it turns out everything has its place without resorting to overcrowding.

Throughout there's the sense that Slow Club are less a project based on a long term gameplan and more an opportunity for two friends to have fun while writing songs built on genuine emotion and human connection. 'Because We're Dead' runs on a rockabilly/skiffle shuffle that often seems to be hanging on for dear life but succeeds through broad joyfulness. 'Giving Up On Love' and 'Trophy Room' borrow the celebrated Johnny Cash rhythm and turns it towards the jangly dark side, while 'It Doesn't Have To Be Beautiful' hides tear-stained lyrical matter to a frenetic shifting country-punk hoedown a la latter day Mekons, providing in its coda the first of only two appearances of the massed overdub vocal army that's showed up on a couple of their previous singles. But for all their capabilities of variation, Slow Club's strength is that they sound spontaneous and celebratory about the act of being able to make music itself, the very thing that drives a successful debut album before the pressures to maintain that level kick in. There's a lightness of touch and sweetness of mood even when the lyrics don't seem to demand it. Slow Club may not belong to any one genre comfortably but they know exactly what they are, and even when they don't want to be all-out acoustic rock'n'roll they're pleasingly enthusiastic and naturally infectious enough for it not to matter." - Simon Tyers / The Line of Best Fit