It All Came To This

Slow Club @ Rock Shop 11/4/2011

Where I’m Waking / Our Most Brilliant Friends / Never Look Back / Horses Jumping / Beginners / If We’re Still Alive / Only If You’re Certain / The Dog / Two Cousins // Giving Up On Love

There are a lot of cute, energetic indie-pop bands out there, and I worry that Slow Club gets lost in the shuffle somewhat, and that people just think of them as another twee Matt & Kim thing. But while Slow Club may have some superficial similarity to other contemporary acts, their skill level as songwriters and musicians is a cut above. As I wrote in my review of their new album Paradise on Pitchfork, Rebecca Taylor has blossomed into an outstanding vocalist – confident and bold, but with a degree of subtlety and restraint. Though the band is a bit more wild in concert, this nuance carries over to the live performance.

Slow Club “Beginners”

“Beginners” is the band – and Taylor – at their best. The arrangement has some force and intensity, but the rumble of the percussion doesn’t over shadow the vocal melody. It’d be such a shame if it did – so much of what makes this song totally heart breaking lies in the way Taylor’s voice inflects on lines like “of all the things to lose / it’s you I choose” and “I know I haven’t got all the answers / if I did I would be screaming them out!” This is clearly a song about complex feelings, and just enough gets spelled out that you can infer a lot more just from the feeling.

Buy it from Amazon.