Vaccines rock up with a cure for the winter blues
THE Vaccines might have become standard bearers for a punchy strain of guitar music in the 12 years since they topped the charts with their second album, Come Of Age, but they’ve never quite shaken off their debt to the storytelling traditions of the folk scene.
Singer Justin Young began his career as a sensitive singer-songwriter and adopted the stage name Jay Jay Pistolet as he cut his teeth in West London indie-folk clubs alongside Laura Marling and his flatmate Marcus Mumford’s banjo-toting Mumford & Sons.
And, in searching for a title to sum up The Vaccines’ sixth album, he turned to a celebrated folk-rock single, Don McLean’s 1971 hit American Pie, taking McLean’s line, ‘with a pink carnation and a pickup truck’ and readjusting it.
‘American Pie is a song about disillusionment with the American dream and I was coming to terms with similar things,’ he explains.
Not that Pick-Up Full Of Pink Carnations is a folk record.
With its razor-sharp guitars and tuneful hooks in thrall to the Tin Pan Alley pop of the 1960s, it’s an exhilarating rock ’n’ roll album that should banish any January blues. But it’s also — and this is where Young’s acoustic roots come into play — a thoughtful, poetic set of songs about the loss of innocence.
The Vaccines have been reinvigorated by two major changes. With the departure of original guitarist Freddie Cowan, touring member Timothy Lanham has taken on a more central role.
A new producer, LAbased Andrew Wells, has also brought a tight, fizzing sheen to ten songs that hurtle by in a shade over 30 minutes. It’s a vibrant, fresh start. The best tracks mix introspection with rousing hooks. The Strokes-like Lunar Eclipse laments the passing of time, while Young, 36, wrote the bittersweet Sometimes, I Swear after visiting his childhood bedroom in Southampton following a festival show in Portsmouth. ‘Sometimes, I swear, it feels like I don’t belong anywhere,’ he sighs. But the overriding mood is buoyant. Sunkissed is a Californian love song in which Young becomes so enamoured with the surf culture of the Pacific coast that he grows a beard to look like former Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. ‘Something good is going to happen,’ he predicts elsewhere. That something is an album to kickstart 2024. DESPITE hits such as Chasing Rainbows and Going For Gold, Shed Seven operated in the shadows of Cool Britannia’s bighitters Oasis, Pulp and Blur in the 1990s. Naming themselves after a railway hut in their York home town didn’t exactly boost their hipster credentials, but the Britpop underdogs have enjoyed a fruitful second coming on the nostalgia circuit since reuniting in 2007.
New album A Matter Of Time is the quintet’s first in six years and it sticks to tried-and-trusted guitar styles. The songwriting is workmanlike in places, but it’s hard not to be won over by the chiming riffs and Beatles-like harmonies of Kissing California, or the puppyish enthusiasm of Let’s Go, a song about on-the-road shenanigans that is clearly so pivotal that it gets a second airing as Let’s Go (Again).
With frontman Rick Witter and guitarist Paul Banks in their early 50s, there’s a touch of ageappropriate reflection, plus three guest cameos that reiterate the band’s pulling power.
Rowetta (of the Happy Mondays) and Laura McClure (of Reverend & The Makers) supply backing vocals, while long-term fan Pete Doherty duets with real intent on the country-rock ballad Throwaways.