Review of Lie Lover Lie Album by Blood Arm

The Blood Arm
Lie Lover Lie
Album Review

Blood Arm Lie Lover Lie Album

Listen to ‘Lie Lover Lie’ all the way through from start to finish just the once and you’d swear your life on it that The Blood Arm come from somewhere north of Hadrian’s Wall.

Singer Nathan Fregoso’s lyrical pronunciations and almost incendiary Scotch-isms sound like the musical equivalent of a Glasgow Kiss, while his band’s arrangements owe more than a passing debt to the likes of Franz Ferdinand and the whole Postcard set from years gone by.

Delve a little deeper though and you’ll actually discover that this four-piece originate from the sunny confines of LA, rather than the desolate council estates of Bellshill, and while it doesn’t exactly diminish the fact that a lot of their immediate influences are as obvious as night following day, it does at least conjure up a little more respect for the subservient nature at which our American cousins are looking over this side of the pond for a change in search of divine inspiration rather than the other way round.

‘Lie Lover Lie’ is pretty much standard fare in this post-Strokes infused musical universe, in that a lot of these songs probably wouldn’t have existed pre-2001 when all things were a bit too nu-metal or Coldplaited, and whereas a lot of their contemporaries haven’t got out of playing the local bars on the Strip, at least The Blood Arm have made every effort to engage themselves in recreating the next step, even if that does make them imitators to some extent.

Having said that, ‘Lie Lover Lie’ contains a good half a dozen instantaneous moments of pleasure that wouldn’t sound out of place in any self-respecting indie niterie, and anyone who hasn’t punched the air gleefully whilst chanting “I like all the girls and all the girls like me!” (‘Suspicious Character’) on a Saturday night like some demented town crier obviously hasn’t a sense of humour or ore of self-satisfaction about them.

When all’s said and done, this record won’t win any prizes for originality or ingenuity but there’s many a worse collection of songs been released this year, so for that reason alone, we’ll give them a fair-to-medium score of…

3/5

Dom Gourlay


Official Site - http://www.thebloodarm.com

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