Race Horses, Furniture
Featured Album
Electropop with a melodramatic touch
A young band hoping to make its mark upon the world is well-served by a taste for high drama, and Cardiff-based Race Horses pricked up a few ears with the theatrical flair of their 2010 debut Goodbye Falkenburg. Furniture takes their pop adventuring further, singer Meilyr Jones’s excitable yelp guiding songs that hark back to the other side of Britpop: not parkas and desert boots, but satin trousers and lots of glitter. Although the jovial experimentation of “Mates” or “Old And New”‘s cosmic balladry bear the marks of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals – and not merely because they are Welsh – Race Horses display a melodramatic touch that those bands never really possessed. The influence of Sparks and Roxy Music is palpable on these songs, and at times – on “Sisters,” for instance – they just about manage to cram themselves into Jarvis Cocker’s cords. Race Horses are best, however, when they go a bit more free-range (or deranged): On dark electro-pop fantasy “My Year Abroad,” Jones plays a businessman desperate to hit “the sinful lights of Tokyo,” while “See No Green” starts clammily lo-fi before oozing into a self-flagellating torch song: “I’m just a hotel/ I’m just a place you stay.” On this evidence, however, Race Horses wouldn’t want you to get too comfortable.
