Liverpool mavericks Courting are not ones to hang about when it comes to releasing an album, this is their third long player in less than 3 years, following their 2022 debut Guitar Music and last years’ epic New Last Name.
And as barking and genre-crossing as an almost-concept record that NLM was, then it left us no clues to how they were going to follow it up, so going into listening to this, it’s anyone’s guess which way they will head on record number 3, the (not-so) catchy title is hint-less, (and we’ll choose to skip past the terrible cover).
It starts with a gorgeous violin-led instrumental introduction piece, which doesn’t quite mentally prepare us for the absolute cacophony that comes next.
‘Stealth Rollback’ sounds like vintage Pop Will Eat Itself or The Prodigy, all muffled vocals over some serious pounding dance beats (none of which I had on my bingo card), part way through the first time I heard it, I checked to see how long it had been going on, and it was only 80 seconds in, but it had already sounded like 5 different songs, just before the three minute mark it crumples to an end, before the ‘it couldn’t be more like early 2000’s LCD Soundsystem but with more cowbell if it tried vibe’ of ‘Pause At You’, and the juddering juxtaposition of the two disparate songs is genuinely thrilling, and the thought of all these curveballs bursting out springs to mind, is this going to be a classic album, will this be the one that finally makes them impossible to pigeonhole?
But then. To call the album front-loaded may be doing it a disservice, but what follows is something of a mid album lull, which, when it arrives, is as disappointing as it is surprising.
‘Namcy’, ‘Eleven Sent (This Time)’ and recent single ‘After You’ are all far more straightforward than what’s gone before, they are more akin to the first album, just literal guitar music, and although there’s orchestral and brass flourishes, with the paucity of tracks on offer (there’s only 8 on the record), it does give the impression that maybe they’ve run out of steam. Thankfully, this is not completely the case.
They get their collective mojo back for ‘Lust For Life’, it’s moody, almost jazz at times, before it stomps along a la Arcade Fire and then breaks into a 70’s AOR section, all in the space of its 6 and a half minutes, with ‘Likely Place For Them To Be‘ ending things with their customary wonky chug, before the introduction fiddles come back in again.
All in all, if we were to describe it as anything, it would be frustrating, it all sounds a bit rushed, like they’ve just used what they’ve got song-wise, rather than a coherent, thought-out plan for a record, which was an obvious feature of both albums one and two. Maybe if they gave themselves a bit longer before putting it out, they would have come up with the genre-smashing classic that is undoubtedly somewhere within them.
Lust for Life, Or: ‘How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’ is released on 14th March through Lower Third.
