Four years have passed since Romeo Stodart and co gathered to record an album. Long-time masters of often-overlooked first principles such as melody, harmony and songwriting, the quartet here indulge their natural instinct to gravitate towards the sweet spots of late 20th-century rock and pop, variously evoking the supple swing of Marc Bolan, the gnarled overdrive of Neil Young and the American teen pop revered by everyone from Phil Spector to Bruce Springsteen. It’s a warm, uplifting collection unencumbered by notions of cool, concerned instead with beauty, love and optimism.
Where The Keeper and Shotgun Wedding channel the glam jive of T Rex (with a sprinkling of Big Star), Runaways takes matters into another dimension entirely, shifting between woozily nocturnal verses and sunlit choruses with the ease of Buckingham/Nicks-era Fleetwood Mac. The dexterity continues with Sweet Divide, which draws both on Young’s valve-melting guitar work and his penchant for a loping groove, the delicate poignancy of Wayward and the classic melodrama of Dreamer, a song you’d like to think Roy Orbison is singing in heaven.
If this record wants for anything it is personality, but for those with a thirst for mellifluous, accomplished and unapologetically adult pop-rock it will be nigh impossible to see past Outsiders.
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