Good Weather For Airstrikes

Our love for the late London three-piece Fear of Flying has been well documented over the past two years, so you can imagine our disappointment when we learned of the group’s dissolution in late 2007. But disappointment quickly turned to excitement when it was revealed the boys were back together and recording under a new name, and the results are all kinds of brilliant. White Lies, as they’re now called, pick up where Fear of Flying left off with a fairly straightforward brand of infectious guitar-rock, but where their former group made their money on cheap, catchy hooks and frantic pacing, the new recordings have a newfound depth to them. Darker, more ambitious and with a previously unheard penchant for the epic, White Lies’ look fully able to go the distance this time out.

Recording once again under the tutelage of legendary producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur, Kaiser Chiefs), White Lies seem to have embraced the sound of some of the production maestro’s former bands. On demo tracks “Unfinished Business” and “Death”, frontman Harry McVeigh channels Morrissey with a touch of Brandon Flowers for good measure, while the instrumentation recalls that of Echo & The Bunny Men or Joy Division. Surely the last thing we need right now is another band ripping off the aforementioned, but somehow White Lies rise above their like-minded contemporaries and sound like nothing else I’ve heard so far in 2008. Furthermore, their finely-tuned, polished sound could lead you to mistake them for a band two albums into their career, but in fact their debut single doesn’t drop until the end of the month. Out April 28th on Chess Club Recordings, a new label co-founded by Lies drummer Jack Brown, Will Street (son of Stephen) and video director and photographer Max Knight, “Unfinished Business” looks set to cause quite a stir in the industry, though word on the street has it they’ve already been locked up by Universal offshoot Fiction Records (Snow Patrol, Kate Nash, The Maccabees) for a full-album deal. Either way, White Lies are a definite band to watch for 2008. “Death” sounds like the best song the Killers never wrote (the breakdown at the end? yeahhh) and you’d be wise to get all up on that shit below.

MP3: “Death” (Demo) - White Lies

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 9:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.