What is it with trad British indie-rock bands actively selling themselves short at the moment? Vaccines frontman Justin Young has said of their forthcoming third album, "We wanted to make something that sounds amazing next year and then terrible in 10 years." And here's Palma Violets' co-frontman Sam Fryer: "There's no producer in the world who could make us sound professional." At least Catfish & the Bottlemen reach for the sky (or Glastonbury's main stage) as they're scraping the barrel. Perhaps it's a symptom of having been the barometer/straw men of the Great British Music Press Hype Machine (the sheer fact of which seems to prime the nation's indie bands for America's contempt): retreat before you get replaced.
Reviews of Palma Violets' 2013 debut, 180, lambasted fickle British music magazines for telling teenagers that the all-male London four-piece were the next big thing (what a crime), while conceding that the record's punch-drunk mix of Gun Club swagger and the Clash's more jovial insurrection was actually alright. On Danger in the Club, Palma Violets have willfully regressed, from punk to pub-rock—or "pre-punk", as they've been calling it. Spearheaded by Dr. Feelgood, Brinsley Schwarz, and Eddie and the Hot Rods, pub rock was a reaction against prog, glam, and bands ascending to theater venues that priced out their early supporters. The genre was quickly trumped by punk proper, and doesn't have a lot of cachet today.
Palma Violets have talked about briefly hating each other by the end of the tour for their debut album, and having no ideas for their second as recently as midway through 2014. 180 wasn't original, but it had energy and high stakes on its side: its youthful relationships were either world-beating or the end of the world, and the nonsensical titles/lyrics ("Johnny Bagga' Donuts", "Chicken Dippers") hinted at a wealth of winking in-jokes between besotted friends. The band members are only now in their very early 20s, but the mood on Danger in the Club is misanthropic, tired of life and home and girls. "I would rather die than be in love", the band's other vocalist, Chilli Jesson, sings on "Coming Over To My Place", a dissolute memory of the melody to the Cure's "Friday I'm in Love". With the help of a supporting gang, he sings the line over and over, in a state of forced triumphant collapse that just seems sad.
Danger in the Club is beset by a powerful sense of dread, but there's little effort in Palma Violets' performance, despite their claims that producer John Leckie drilled them to extremes. (It's worth remembering that after an uninspired debut, he helped tease The Bends out of an equally mixed-up young Radiohead, who came to him, as Palmas did, for his work on Magazine's 1978 album, Real Life.) They wanted to retain the quality of their early demos, but the boggy result lacks the debut's clarity. The bottom end bludgeons and their surf guitars are sloppy, the band playing like drunken British seaside pier entertainers reduced to grabbing from their '00s forebears. Interpol's self-pitying specter looms on the dismal ambience of "No Money Honey" and the moronic, Byronic "Matador". "Secrets of America" rips off the returning Libertines' shambolic rockers without any of their heart, and "The Jacket Song" sounds conspicuously like Doherty and co's lovely ballad "Radio America".
For their many faults, the Libertines, Palmas' Rough Trade forebears, had astute things to say about British class and society. The main lyrical takeaway from Danger in the Club is that Jesson and Fryer are dreadful poets, attempting to pass off misery as depth and exhibiting a noxious distaste for the women that have left them, or deigned to try and love them. The record opens with an iPhone recording of the owners of the Welsh studio they recorded in singing "Sweet Violets", a comic traditional about how women are only interested in a man's money. Where the Palmas mythologized girls on 180, here they're a nuisance or wearying source of pain at best, slappers (the title track) at worst, something to be stepped on to feel better. "We'll probably burn out and fail", Fryer and Jesson sing on "Girl, You Couldn't Do Much Better on the Beach". "Well, at least I was a marvelous failure/ You'll be like the rest… a nonsensical benign success!"
In a recent NME feature that gauged political feeling among bands in the run-up to the UK general election, Jesson, said that Palma Violets had "tried to consciously not be political" on their second album. (It's hard to believe they tried much at all.) "Everything is so fucking politically correct at the moment that if you say something out of line it's almost like you're trying to provoke something," he said, risibly. A charitable perspective might see the band's embrace of pub rock as a conscious rejection of political correctness in the form of so-called good taste; the reality is that it seems like a last-ditch attempt to aestheticize a sublime lack of inspiration.
