For The Sake Of Ideals

Johnny Boy “War On Want” – I shouldn’t be so concerned with what other people think of records that I love, but I can’t help it – it just breaks my heart to see this Johnny Boy album get bad reviews, especially when they seem to miss the appeal of the record completely. I quite like Rob Mitchum personally, and he’s written some incredibly sharp and thoughtful reviews for Pitchfork over the past few years, but his review is particularly egregious. He was judging the album against The Go Team and USE, which is just all wrong. There’s definitely a few songs that could fit under the “indie dance” banner, but that’s not what the record is overall.

The album is essentially a pastiche of British pop from the past ten years, cutting and pasting bits from britpop, UK indie, and chart pop for specific ends. On one level, Johnny Boy are obviously just very big pop fans with a knack for songwriting and arrangement, and on another, they are intentionally detourning the signifiers of recent British pop with their sloganeering. I think that some of it is about setting a time and a place, but the styles they mimic are not accidental. They want the heady rush of impossibly anthemic choruses, and song structures that reach for the heavens while their feet stuck in Glastonbury mud. They steal the menace from late period Pulp, the spiteful grandeur of Manic Street Preachers, and appropriate the manic blitz of Girls Aloud. “War On Want” echoes The Verve at their soul-searing best with a track that sounds epic but feels entirely personal. Every rejection builds until the singer wants to completely negate herself, and as she comes up to that precipice, the bottom drops out beneath her. It’s desperate and angry, and strangely, very sexy. I don’t know if you’ve had moments in your life like this song, but I certainly have. It’s the sound of idealism getting swallowed by frustration, and resentment over one’s own perceived powerlessness brewing into full-on self-loathing. No, it’s not that fun, but it’s not really meant to be. (Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)