Review: Courting :: Guitar Music

GUITAR MUSIC, that’s at least an honest album title. You think so at first, but then the opener breaks off after a few guitar chords and turns into a dull, pumping beat, over which a distorted voice declaims. And when the guitar returns, it’s a battered, noise-damaged, ugly image of itself. Just as everything seems to be assaulted on the debut of Courting, the youthful Liverpool sensation: the sound, the voice of Sean Murphy-O’ Neill, who sometimes seems to be being chased through a megaphone, and of course the content.

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“I don’t wanna be a popstar now,” Murphy-O’Neill states almost emotionlessly, and otherwise it’s a lot about insecurity and uneasiness, feeling out of place and being wrong, about the American dream, which is no longer that either , what he used to be, and British society, which is screwed up anyway but still happily plays tennis. The result is classic English kitchen-sink fury with at least the occasional pop appeal—and a teenage version of Mark E. Smith at the best moments.

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