Hotel Lux put their best foot forward with ‘Hands Across the Creek’
There is a palpable cultural shift happening in alternative music. Only a few years ago, a barrage of privately educated bands wearing ill-fitting suits, complete with the smugness of having “roughed it” in an inner city suburb, littered the airwaves. Now, however, we have a collection of bands desperately trying to avoid being tarred with the same ‘post-punk’ brush that so neatly rendered those groups inauthentic. Hotel Lux are struggling with a similar issue on their debut record Hands Across the Creek.
The band, raised in Portsmouth but truly cemented within the bustling South London punk scene that blew up five or so years ago, have fought against being typecast for most of their fledgling career. Fighting against categorisation and the aforementioned, dreaded, genre-defined tag — in itself a hallmark of nouveau post-punk bands — is likely something the group will have to do for years to come.
The best way to achieve such a feat is to provide unique and original music, which, for the most part, the band deliver on Hands Across the Creek. Across the record, there are some moments that will make the most cynical listeners cringe. Unfortunately, the continued use of spoken word vocals on bouncing-bass has been so over-used that it has lost all impact. Similarly, the satire of a tanking society can also feel like the guffaws of a metropolitan elite given the space to make such witty retorts in the face of troubles.
However, it does beg the question: how can a modern band address the destruction of our society by a government seemingly hell-bent on milking every bit of joyful community we have without sounding contrived? If we remove our cynical hats and listen closely to each song’s merits, the band paints a more appealing picture of both themselves and the state of the music scene.
‘Eastbound and Down’ is a lurching attack on the City of London and its desire to swallow champagne and spit it out on those putting away their paltry savings. ‘Strut’ is a self-referential desire for the music industry to provide “quirky” new sounds for an audience that rarely sticks their head above the streaming parapet, all with a Blockheads-bounce that feels ironically idiosyncratic.
A particular highlight is ‘National Team’, an effortless anthem that digs deep into our universal fear of lost youth. Focusing on the strange sensation of seeing sportspeople become younger and younger as they grow older, the band managed to convey a sense of dizzying loss and wrap it within the notion of nationalism, perhaps offering a connection between the two. There’s an easy line to draw between the inability to achieve one’s dreams and the need to find solace in blaming another group for that failure: Hotel Lux are happy to be holding the pen that scribes it.
Most of the tunes on the LP are built out of a range of different musical styles, there are horns, hefty basslines, the odd sardonic vocal and even a riff or two. But, one of the record’s more pertinent moments comes from ‘Morning After Mourning’. The tune feels like it may verge into a quasi-Kooks and Jamie T collaboration for a few moments before the lyrics melt away. The potency of the instrumental highlights just how alleviating the very essence of music can be, not just for the listener but the creator too. ‘An Ideal for Living’ probably verges too close to the previously mentioned paradigm but is not without its charm.
Things kick back into gear with ‘Points of View’, one of the band’s more obviously barbed attacks on the world around them. It challenges us to take stock of a society demonising children with the chutzpah to try and escape their war-torn countries. However, it isn’t all terrifying imagery of a crumbling community; vitally, the band have hope, and on ‘Solidarity Song’, they share their vision of a more harmonious world.
Hotel Lux are certainly trying to avoid being branded yet another post-punk band from South London. If they continue to put their best foot forward, creating honest and authentic work that doesn’t strive for acceptance but delivers on their vision of their journey, they’ll succeed in becoming their own entity soon enough. Hands Across the Creek is a great start.
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