Post War Glamour Girls – ‘Pink Fur’ album review: theatrical and powerful
Post War Glamour Girls, a young four-piece from Leeds, have been making waves in their local scene for a few years. Pink Fur is their debut full-length album. Despite the album’s striking black cover featuring two dramatic faces—one mid-scream and the other looking on with fearful apprehension—suggesting something avant-garde or foreign, it turns out to be a surprisingly well-crafted rock record for the 2010s.
It’s one of those albums that, for better or worse, demands the listener’s full attention. With its screeches of feedback, clever lyrics, and frequent shifts in style, it invites you to sit down and absorb every detail in its entirety.
Central to the band’s sound are the two excellent lead vocalists on board. James Smith and Alice Scott use their disparate voices, his a full-throated anguished baritone, hers a spooky contralto, to great effect all throughout the disc.
Opener ‘Sestra’ is a six-minute epic built on a slowly chugging bass line, starting off with a nonchalantly sullen verse by the former to sparse accompaniment before opening up, switching lead vocalist and heading into a bridge where Smith beseeches the target of his lyrics, or the hearer if you will, to “use your fucking ears and listen”, our man at the microphone gloriously sounding like a cross between Black Francis doing his shouty, rhythmically groaning bits from the first two Pixies records, and some overly-refreshed bloke outside a half-filled Leeds indie night shouting at his mates.
There’s messy guitar feedback and heavyweight post-rock here, too, with hometown heroes and bill-sharers I Like Trains being an obvious influence. ‘Powdered Milk Asylum’ is a solid chunk of danceable post-punk certain to get any northwestern indie venue going.
‘Stolen Flowers Rust’, meanwhile, is almost funky in its swinging heaviness. The album closes with ‘Brat’, a thundering epilogue that builds on the themes from ‘Sestra’, intensifying them, slathering the chorus in the reverbing choir and hacking it to bits with thumping drums and screams. “Cathartic”, a first-year art student might say.
That’s the thing, though; there’s braveness to the way Post War Glamour Girls dare to be ostentatious in between the noise. Although no strangers to clever production and dizzying feedback, they don’t hide their melodies and lyrics behind the deafening waterfall of reverb and delay favoured by contemporary guitar bands.
Although not all of these brazen outbursts hit the spot, most do. This mess is theatrical, powerful and definitely worth a listen.
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