Album Review :: The Jaded Hearts Club - You’ve Always Been Here

Album

The Jaded Hearts Club

You’ve Always Been Here

October 2 2020 (BMG)

8.5/10

Words: Paul Dawson

Featuring frontmen Miles Kane (The Last Shadow Puppets) and Nic Cester (Jet), guitarists Graham Coxon (Blur) and Jamie Davis, plus Matt Bellamy (Muse) on bass and drummer Sean Payne (The Zutons), this six-strong supergroup come together as The Jaded Hearts Club for this, their debut album.

The 11-track ‘You’ve Always Been Here’ is an album which rocks in at just under 30 minutes. However, for those expecting to have 11 original tracks throughout, these are in fact covers of legendary blues, pop and soul classics songs going back six or seven decades by artists such as Marvin Gaye, Four Tops, Isley Brothers - and is even opened with Bellamy's suitably retro gramophone vocal on the Vera Lynn standard 'We'll Meet Again'; fitting perhaps given how the group originated: being brought together as a one-off by Davis to perform Beatles' covers at his birthday party celebration.

As with all reworked songs, we have to ask does the song improve on the original, or at least do something different? While 'Reach Out I'll Be There' sounds as gloriously soul-infused as it did when the Four Tops first dominated the charts with it back in 1966, and 1959's 'Have Love Will Travel', written and recorded by Richard Berry (and later recorded by The Sonics), holds firm enough to its roots, in the case of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ - originally released by Jalacy "Screamin" Jay Hawkins in 1956 - The Jaded Hearts Club certainly make this their own; taking the song's dark undertones and plying with a searing, volatile guitar and vocals - by Coxon and Cester respectively - backed with a heavy thumping jazz-metal rhythm section.

Elsewhere, they follow The Beatles and The Flying Lizards with a new millennia take on 'Money (That’s What I Want)', while the 1967 rare Marvin Gaye Tamla anthem 'This Love Starved Heart of Mine (It’s Killing Me)', becomes a raw, psych-tinged rocker, before closing on the hot and steamy 'Fever'.

There's no question about the musical ability of the musicians within the band as individuals, and collectively they have pooled their respective skills into a collection of covers which should liven up Christmas living-rooms everywhere this year.