The Dears, Gang Of Losers
How to remain gloomy when the recording budgets alone is double what you used to live on in a year.
Boasting a virulent strain of melancholy, the Dears sophomore album No Cities Left delighted those who felt Elbow could do with being a little more miserable. The NME — flattered that this Montreal sextet should be so competent at such artful Britpop noir — duly welcomed singer Murray Lightburn as a bedsit poet to match Morrissey at his most operatic. (Lightburn — a huge fan — duly cried when Moz asked the band to support him.)
All of which brings us to the tricky part: how to remain gloomy when the artist's garret has been replaced by a gleaming tour bus and the recording budgets alone are double what you used to live on in a year?
For a soul as sensitive as Lightburn, of course, this is even more reason to be depressed. “The world is really gonna love you…” he sighs mockingly in "Ticket to Immortality," dreading that first gold disc, whilst "Death or Life We Want You" is as gloomy as anything on Nirvana's In Utero. With the lush orchestral arrangements replaced by a hard-wired, guitar-driven sound, Lightburn runs riot, mocking his own position in the indie scene as the son of Belizian immigrants ("Whites Only Party") and musing “What kind of hell am I in?” amidst the funk inflections of "I Fell Deep." Darker and more demanding that No Cities Left, the mood is one of resilience and, ultimately, optimism, best summed up by the title track. “You and I are on the outside of almost everything,” Lightburn sighs, watching from the sidelines as a mad world goes about its business.
