Vegas Water Taxi – ‘Long Time Caller, First Time Listener’ album review: Witty ideas that deserve more
Somewhere between the cracks of the cultural pillars we all lean on, is a genuine everyday existence. It’s easy to forget, though, with the internet genuinely seeking to remove all nuance of our existence, and so you’d be forgiven for thinking that modern life is Charli XCX, flat whites at a gentrified cafe and hipster radio stations. But Vegas Water Taxi’s second album, Long Time Caller, First Time Listener, gives a soundtrack to the realism caught up in the metropolitan smog.
The Skinny: Vegas Water Taxi’s album tracklisting reads like the moodboard of a millennial who has just descended upon East London, where, wide-eyed with the promise of cultural reverence, buzzwords are collected like Pokémon. ‘Brat Summer,’ ‘Birkenstocks’ and ‘NTS’ are but a few of the cultural signifiers highlighted, as a means of tackling the irony of pop-culture through the lens of late-stage capitalism.
It’s Charli XCX’s namesake that opens the record, and immediately confronts the listener with the satire that will subtly lace the entire record. The band’s Ben Hambro explained, “It imagines a world where people who had not participated in brat summer were being rounded up by the police.”
Appropriately, that song is laid on top of a song that acts as quite the antithesis of a ‘Brat summer’. There’s not a single modular synthesiser in sight. Instead, it’s a warm four-on-the-floor drum beat and a mid-tempo guitar melody that thrusts a post-modern London back into the safe realms of indie rock.
Sonically, that’s a statement the rest of the record follows. Led by Hambro, Vegas Water Taxi’s Fred Lawton (bass/guitar), Charlie Meyrick (drums/guitar), and Molly Shields (backing vocals) lay down a record that consistently flows through carefully constructed indie songs that indeed foreground the observational wit of the lyrics.
But the consistency at times renders the record into a sort of frustrating simplicity. The kernel of a great album that wryly satirises the world around it exists, but at times flatters to deceive within the relative safety of the arrangements. It’s only really ‘Chateau Photo’ and ‘Jerry’ where the band genuinely deviate from the formula and gives you a taste of a band operating within their own identity, as opposed to one deliberately parodying the world around them.
The verdict: Long Time Caller, First Time Listener is a good album, nevertheless. The ideas and instrumentation are executed well, but it lacks the punch that the overarching idea of societal observation warrants.
Standout track: ‘Jerry’
Release Date: February 5th, 2025 | Producer: Louis Milburn | Label: PNKSLM Recordings
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