If there is any band that needed a reinvention in UK Indie rock, it’s The Vaccines. Their first two albums brought them commercial success due to the fact that they had a few songs per album that had some decent pop melodies peppered into their tiresome unoriginal flavour Indie bands who have been deemed as the ‘saviours of guitar music‘. The Vaccines themselves have strange ambitions with this album, seemingly reaching for the stars but not intending for it to sound at all timeless stating that they want it to be so genre-defining that it’ll sound “amazing next year and terrible in 10 years!”.
There’s nothing quite genre-defining about English Graffiti, but it sure as hell is an improvement for the band because at times it sounds nothing like them at all. They’ve cited how Pop and Hip-Hop are always pushing boundaries and they’re always evolving commenting on the somewhat stale state of guitar music in the UK; a scene that actually included The Vaccines mostly due to the press heralding them as such messiahs. This album is the sound of a band trying to get out of that scene and partly succeeding.
They use their influence of Hip-Hop on the stomping beats of tracks like ‘Dream Lover‘ which in turn, has them sounding a lot like Arctic Monkeys did on their album that also took influence from Hip-Hop AM. The song that follows it ‘Minimal Affection‘ sounds like they’ve taken influence from melancholy pop songs of the 80s in their melodies and guitar solos and end up sounding just like some of the more downbeat songs on The Strokes’ Comedown Machine.
None of the ideas on this album are anything new to music – they’ve all been done to quite a lot of commercial success by other bands before. But at least The Vaccines’ music carries itself in a way that’s so confident that it doesn’t matter if it’s original. They’re taking baby steps into the world of experimentation and actually trying to get some grit under their nails. There’s extremely distorted guitars absolutely all over this album that channel their inner-Ramones such as ‘20/20‘.
At other times it sounds like they’ve distorted absolutely everything in the mixing which can be to the detriment of the song-writing like on the track ‘Radio Bikini‘ which sounds like all of their ideas thrown together into one pot. The vocals can be particularly jarring when they don’t click. There’s a distinct balancing act between experimenting and song-writing that The Vaccines occasionally tip in the favour of experimentation. But when they nail the balancing act they create some of the best material of their career so far especially when the songs aren’t blasting you in the face such as the lovely ballad ‘Maybe I Could Hold You‘.
The Vaccines have done something impressive in that a whole lot more of their critics may take them more seriously as a band after this album and will now be interested to see what they have in the cannon next. English Graffiti isn’t an album that will completely reinvented them as a band, but one that shows a lot more promise in this band’s longevity than previous releases.
