Flowers In Your Dustbin kicks up the pace with a clanking bassline and a recurring guitar motif that sounds like the old Doctor Who theme. It also boasts a chorus that recalls You Me At Six at their most anthemic, with a sense of urgency bolstered by Muse-like fret histrionics. It’s here that Henry vents his frustration for a generation trapped by circumstance and apathy: ‘I threw up blood in the fountain of youth/I don’t have a place, I don’t have a home, I take my meds, I live through my phone.’ Then there’s Halo, an unflinching look at heroin addiction, featuring the grim lyric, ‘A thick brown belt on my arm again, a tablespoon full of tar again,’ buoyed by an earworm of a chorus.
It’s not just life in their hometown that comes under the microscope. If I Can’t Have It No One Can, a song quickly reworked in the studio after a run-in with the New Jersey police department, is one of the album’s more vicious moments, flitting between coolly-delivered threats from an armed officer to a barrage of violent intentions: ‘If push came to shove, I wouldn’t think twice, I’d slit your throat just to survive.’ It all ends with The Day That I Ruined Your Life which, much like the opening title-track, is a haunting number that bookends the album, as acoustic guitars, shimmering synths and distorted guitar build to soundtrack the tale of a painful breakup.
In Welcome To The Neighbourhood, Boston Manor have taken the promise of their debut and moulded it into an exciting body of work. They’ve absorbed the sense of despair that can permeate through a small town and, while they’re not offering solutions or pointing the finger for their hometown’s shortcomings, they’ve made an album that is both compelling and, sometimes, even beautiful.
Words: Simon Young
Boston Manor's Welcome To The Neighbourhood is out now on Pure Noise Records. Check it out below. The band are on tour this month. More information here.