#normal town

Swaggering, blue-collar rust-belt anthems of New … 

... Malden? Newport Pagnell? Newton Aycliffe?

Imagine (if you will) a world where Bruce Springsteen grew up in a drab, small town in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Then imagine what his hymns to New Jersey’s main streets, drug stores, first loves and industrial decline might sound like.

There you have the general picture of the new album from The Dreaming Spires, Normal Town.

A brave suggestion on Plunger’s part, you might say, but there’s a thread of Bruciness in many of the tracks (to our ears at least) particularly the first six of the twelve. Big production (they’re not afraid of a bit of reverb these lads, or indeed a lot. And then maybe a bit more on top...) Some rather Springsteen-y anthemic chord progressions and pacings, and even when less obviously so. lyrical touches like “let the sirens wail…, give me that rock and roll” could be the Boss without too much of a stretch. 

The thread of small town Britishness is a resolutely antithetical lack of Brucey bombast or grandiositude: led by a Robert Wyattesque fragile vox that aches, quavers, cracks and at times sounds close to tears (a common result of living in a small town) the instrumentation is rich and varied but shuns grandstanding or flash; and includes left-field items like congas, xylophone, school upright piano, timpani, and sequencers. As well as the spirit of Our Bruce there are snatches of (in no particular order) Lou Reed, Faces, New Order, The Band, Neil Young, Steelers Wheel and even Peter Hammill. Sometime in the same song. So it’s probably not ‘Americana’ as you know it, Jim.

And it’s all rather lovely, frankly, The reverb and use of synths and multi-tracking lend a hallucinatory air to the small town atmosphere of dissatisfaction (with the lack of change, the unwanted changes, the longing to leave or return and the impossibility of both) that blurs the edges of what in other hands could be polemical mithering; while the stylistic variety piques the ear - not many bands would match the frankly proggy complexity of These Days Will End (possibly our favourite track) with the bleak New Wave pulse of Stolen Car (the most home town-y number for those of us who came of age in a 'normal town' late 70/early 80s).

Normal Town is very much out of the ordinary, and all the better for it.

Normal Town is released on 7th November on Clubhouse Records

The album release show is at The Water Rats, Kings Cross, London 6th November

The local crazy’s ravings have been proven true! There is indeed, one single star in the sky.