Attic Lights - Friday Night Lights

by Lisa Holmes

Hit the ground dancing with the Glaswegian popsters shiny debut

"Consistently compared to bands like The Beach Boys, Guided By Voices and Big Star, the ‘Lights are most closely associated with fellow burble popsters Teenage Fanclub."

Attic Lights conjure up the same feeling as the scene in The Big Lebowski when the dude is asked if he is a nihilist. Basically that question would sound just as ridiculous leveled at Attic Lights – not because their stoner ways have robbed them of all inclination towards the darker side of life but because their world is so full of light, hope and belief.

Consistently compared to bands like The Beach Boys, Guided By Voices and Big Star, the ‘Lights are most closely associated with fellow burble popsters Teenage Fanclub. They hail from Glasgow, where you can only imagine they spend their days wafting around the street in a haze of happy feelings (picture dapper lace cuffs and leather trousers – even if the reality proves that they are slightly hirsute Scottish men).

Singing, wooing, strumming all feature heavily on most of the tracks. ‘Wendy’ proves to be a charming ‘choon’ with a great sing-along chorus that Fountains of Wayne would be proud of. ‘Dark Eyes’ provides a great opportunity for the band to get deeper, if by deep you mean wondering the streets of Glasgow bemoaning the loss of your lover. ‘Late Night Sunshine’ is a stand out track with a killer hook and enough power in the layered vocals of the chorus to knock your favourite brown chord jacket off if a maelstrom of swollen indie summer pop.

Having just signed a five album deal with Island, it is reasonable to assume that the label are banking on cleaning up with all of the Teenage Fanclubbers left wanting more. The album is produced by Francis MacDonald of BMX Bandits and co-founder of Shoeshine Records, and they have previously worked with Bjorn Yttling of Peter, Bjorn and John – no doubt they were all whistling from the same page.

Covers are a particular specialty of the band and they have previously sampled Kirsty McColl ‘They Don’t Know’, and Sean Kingston’s ‘Beautiful Girls’.

“I got wasted / I’m not strong enough to resist my dirty thirst.” Self flagellation fro drunkenness is very much on the Attic’s agenda. Lead vocalist Kevin Sherry sounds at once euphoric and regretful, a good boy brought up with old fashioned values and several decades before any one mentioned soft rock.

Attic Lights are strangely magnetic and presumably don’t have a master plan for world domination – which as just as well because they would just have to play this record to a few people and the world would be at their feet, and you get the feeling they wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it.

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