Shrag - Life! Death! Prizes!

  by John Clarkson

published: 3 / 10 / 2010

Label: WIAWYA
Format: CD

intro

Spiky and imaginative indie pop on debut album proper from Brighton-based five piece group, Shrag

There is a refreshing belligerence to Brighton-based five piece group Shrag’s “debut album proper”, ‘Life! Death! Prizes!’ While so many other of the current run of indie pop bands have taken their influence from the C-86/twee movement of the mid 1980’s, Shrag are a much spikier and more imaginative proposition. Their music at one level hearkens back five years earlier than that to the furious and sarcastic political post-punk of female-fronted groups like the Au Pairs and Delta 5. At another, however, both in lead vocalist Helen King’s damning depiction of 21st century Britain, and also in Stephanie Goodman’s sweeping and cinematic keyboard scores, it is never anything less than contemporary. King and her co-vocalist guitarist Bob Brown’s vocals are sometimes lost in the mix on the opening track ‘A Certain Violence’, but, a track of rapidly boiling tensions, its epileptic guitars convey well the bored and empty frustration of those “kids on the street” for whom life offers very little. ‘Their Stats’ is on the surface softer in sound and beneath its scuzzy guitars and Goodman’s soaring keyboards almost elegiac in tone. Lyrically, however, it is equally caustic, pouring scorn on the pointlessness of the balance of government and social statistics (“Maybe we should go to my dirty flat/Talk about the things that make us fat”). Even the ‘love’ songs have an abrasiveness. On the breezy chiming pop of ‘Tights in August’ King tries to seduce a petrified Brown, but as soon as he starts to give in to her she begins to lose interest. ‘When We Go Courting’ pushes Brown and Al Harle’s swaggering and jangling guitars to the fore and, adding the word “disaster” as an afterthought to the title, chronicles the reality of a lot of romances and relationships (“And sometimes I call you my friend/And sometimes I pray for your end”). Only the nearly six minute final track, ‘Coda’, a hymnal-sounding number of resonating guitars and keyboards, offers something more tender. A couple, who have been through a bad patch, confess their continued love for each other. There is ultimately hope even amidst all the despair and grim urbanism of Shrag’s world. Their biting humour and blunt honesty, however, makes them absolutely enthralling.

Track Listing:-