This is less an album and more a novel, and even maybe more a TV drama, with episodes instead of songs, with all the characters given their own chapter but ultimately them all being Lily Fontaine. Some might call that a concept album but this feels like more than that ideal. It’s a new concept. Maybe it isn’t new, but it feels fresh and alive.
The kitchen sink drama, the everyday trials and tribulations and the social commentary mean Lily Fontaine is your John Cooper Clark for the disenfranchised and post-Brexit youth of today. The metaphors are rife for escaping the everyday drudgery of 2020’s Britain. And you’d think they’d end with an optimistic climax but instead, Albert Road is a beautiful but fairly depressing spotlight on how shameful the people of this country can be, albeit with some stunningly beautiful couplets “Chips, gravy and cheese, on your knees, watching the sun settle down,” culminating in a crescendo that sounds more like frustration than a release of fury.
This Could be Texas is open to interpretation. It feels like a play on “This Isn’t Kansas” from Wizard of Oz which in itself was a social commentary. Is it about the homogenisation of our country, is it a comment on the right-wing rise here that mirrors those Trump-loving southern states in the U.S?
What we definitely know is that these are all vignettes in the world of English Teacher. You feel that this is ultimately a multi-media project and this is the soundtrack, the narrative and that anything is possible from them.
Albatross is your archetypal opening track (episode), a slow build, and a gentle intro that eases you in but has an underlying tension that teases at what is coming up next.
This is the re-record of early single World Biggest Paving Slab, a mixture of someone’s inflated ego and inferiority complex, someone that is famous in their own lunch hour but with crippling low self-esteem.
Broken Biscuits reads like a letter complaining about everything and anything to the local paper. A society complaining about immigration, potholes, the bins, their town centre, whether justified or not. Frustration and fear and ignorance.
I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying is a teenage coming-of-age drama in microcosm, angst and confusion.
Mastermind Specialism might be their masterpiece. Looping, dimension shifting cyclical mind warp. Gets into your bones and infiltrates your being. Gentle piano trickles down the hillside of your soul and pools as violin wraps around your cerebral cortex and then it ends.
This Could Be Texas, this could be anywhere, this town is in a state, this state is in a country and this country is in a state.
English Teacher less write songs than plays; a musical, but this isn’t Andrew Lloyd Webber, musically they sustain an intense and repetitive rhythm and melody to implant the poetry into your head. There is a concept for everything, a meticulously planned manifesto that is subtle and also a sledgehammer. Like on ‘Nearly Daffodils’.
‘Not Everybody Gets To Go To Space’ plays out like a cautionary tale, you can’t all get what you want, you don’t all get your 15 minutes, you don’t all win the race, you don’t all win the prize, you don’t all go to space.‘R’n’B’ has been around a while and is there to challenge your pre-determined idea of a black woman in a band and what you expect them to be.
The pace slows towards the end, ‘Blister My Paint’, ‘Sideboob’ and ‘Albert Road’ elongate your drive home, as the sunsets on a town that will eventually show its dark side and why society is in trouble because we’re fragmented and feral and fighting. Ideological warfare, stoking the flames from left to right. It’s why we are how we are and why we don’t get very far.
In a world where the playlist is king on a platform funding war, a piece of art, a piece of wax, with drama and love and frustration and discrimination and beauty and peace, but nothing is ever resolved.
Life in a nutshell. On this sceptred isle.
