Track Of The Day :: New Lovers - Impunity

Words: Linn Branson

Oh yes, we love New Lovers, and we love this second single (released November 19) from their forthcoming album, 'Performance' (due next February) a whole bunch too.

Little Indie featured the Sydney post-punk quartet here back in September with the album's lead cut 'Fatal Shore' where we made much of Nick Elias' very effective - and affecting - baritone. He manages to deliver an equally engrossing delivery here on 'Impunity'.

While there is more of an upbeat driving rhythm to 'Impunity' - along with some rippling keys from Thomas Adams - than was to be found on its darker predecessor, the lyrics cast an intriguing punch, as Nick explains.

"The lyrics offer fragments to a narrative," he tells us, "to which there is no resolve. A femme fatale, granted impunity because 'she was so good looking' - while the protagonists (Jesus and the Monkey Man) vanish and then reappear in low-grade business deals, while her daddy is the shadowed metaphor: the portrait of Dorian Grey, locked and hidden away in the basement. The lyrics originated from a screen play I was writing, a sort of film noire set on a generic highway and a generic city - the city backdrop of crime and the lack of resolve."

The track was recorded live with no overdubs at Jungle Studios in Sydney, the reason being, says Nick, is "because we find that the tracks maintain a sense of dynamic, which we have otherwise failed to realise using layering and click tracks etc. We're inspired by early DIY post-punk, the work on SST records, early Sonic Youth, and the production methodologies of Steve Albini; the notion if you can’t record a whole record in three days, then you shouldn’t record an album."

Little Indie appears to be the only UK-based blog currently lauding this band. Kudos for us maybe, but the rest are surely missing out.

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