English Graffiti
Sony
Three years following the release of their Come Of Age album in 2012, The Vaccines have unleashed not just a new album, but an entirely new, unfamiliar and enlightened sound. The Vaccines have averted their creative ambitions in English Graffiti and broken the self-limitations that their angsty-indie-rock was beginning to inflict upon them.
The quartet is moving on from garage-rock-revival and onto a formulaic post-punk-revival sound, leaving us with only a small aide-memoire of the old Vaccines. With fuzzy, barb-wire-plectrum baselines, Graham Coxon/Jarvis Cooker like vocals and fantastically over-produced, distorted sonic 60s pop synths (to the credit of Fridmann), the Vaccines have created something timeless and indefinable. Handsome and 20/20, though sounding like the soundtrack to a sappy, ceremonious ending to a Disney family movie, are incredibly well-fashioned and leave us with the same gleeful, inspired feeling as their past three albums.
Though The Vaccines previous work conformed fantastically to its garage-pop-rock genre, the band jumped out of the tight-forming stereotype and into an entirely different realm of music. ‘What did you expect from the Vaccines?’, so they asked us in 2011, we can tell you that it probably wasn’t this.
CLAUDIA NATHAN
