(Columbia)
The Vaccines were apparently booked to be on the cover of the NME the week it ceased its print version forever. Bad luck, given their energetic garage rock makes them as close to a perfect NME band as there currently is. But the extremely high quality songwriting on their fourth album means that their church will surely broaden beyond the indie faithful.
There’s a huge waft of Dylan in the keening entreaties and imagery (“If I climb the mountain now / in my patent leather shoes”) of opening track Put It on a T-Shirt, paired with a 1960s girl-group shimmy; the maximal sensuality of Take It Easy sees them shamelessly ape Virginia Plain. Later on, they copy the Strokes copying the Cars (the beautiful Maybe, and Your Love Is My Favourite Band), while Nightclub is like The Clapping Song done by a pissed-off biker gang. There is also plenty of straightforward melodic English punk underpinned by a rhythm section in fifth gear – indeed, it’s only when the energy drops, on needless ballad Young American, that your attention does too. That they totally get away with all this pilfering is proof that nostalgia, even outright theft, only needs a great melody to be forgiven – the band make it all their own with inveterate, instinctive pop toplines. The cluttered digital production of previous album English Graffiti has been simplified and softly scorched by Ross Orton, who worked on Arctic Monkeys’ AM (another touchstone).
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