From Nirvana to the White Stripes, there's a storied tradition of UK media hype catapulting emergent U.S. indie bands to international success. But for all their apparent Yankophilia, the Brits have seemed less eager to make stars out of domestic acts with a pronounced American indie-rock influence. Whether it's the Pixies-schooled punch of Future of the Left or the Pavement-inspired polemics of Los Campesinos!, recent history suggests that the adoption of American college-rock tropes will relegate you to cult status in the UK.
This discouraging evidence seems to have inspired Leeds trio Sky Larkin to fly the proverbial flannel all the more fervently. They've even going so far as to travel to Seattle to record with producer John Goodmanson, whose two most famous clients-- Sleater-Kinney and Death Cab For Cutie-- serve as handy goalposts for the terrain covered on second release Kaleide. And in frontwoman Katie Harkin, Sky Larkin possess a mouthpiece with enough personality and vigor to potentially break them above-ground. Kaleide's excellent opening track, "Still Windmills", is her star-making showcase, a song so anxious it starts right with the chorus, on which Harkin ardently declares, "I know there's potential!" Whether "Still Windmills" is an appeal to her audience to make the most out of their lives or simply an advert for alternative sources of energy, Harkin's performance-- trading off between droll sing-speak and impassioned pleading-- sells you on the need to make it happen now. And the way she suddenly drops her voice for the last line of each verse before the chorus comes crashing back in manages to make the familiar, grunge-standby soft-to-loud trick seem novel again.
It's no great discredit to the album to say that Kaleide peaks with its first song. The remaining material rarely pushes Harkin to the dramatic heights of "Still Windmills", and the singer is guilty of leaning too heavily on vague metaphors. (The keyboard-smoothed "Anjelica Huston" is not so much a tribute to the actress as a random invocation of her femme-fatale archetype.) But Goodmanson's unfussy production is the ideal complement to this young band's fidgety energy-- the live-in-the-room quality works to chisel rather than obscure the hooks on the herky-jerky title track and the joyously berserker "Spooktacular". Appropriately enough, Kaleide translates from Greek as "beautiful form" while phonetically suggesting the act of crashing-- in their most inspired turns, Sky Larkin place equal emphasis on the melody and the mêlée.
