The Envy Corps - Dwell

by Tom Mendelsohn

A musical corps-nucopia

"They’ve perfected a beautiful loping, ringing guitar sound, and an engaging, propulsive song structure."

The Envy Corps have come a long way in a year; we first saw them on the random at The Railway Inn in Winchester – by no means a dive, but not exactly talent’s incubator on the South coast. Since then, while keeping a low profile, the band has been transplanted by their UK record company from their native Des Moines, Iowa, to London’s nondescript Streatham. Since then, they’ve bubbled under, attracting glowing but minor references in newspapers, music press and, bizarrely, Popbitch (or Holy Moly. We forget.). They were fun live, by the way, sweaty and intense, but at the time they sounded like they would be a better prospect live than on record.

Anyway, they’ve made the exact album you’d expect from four very geeky-looking Iowan anglophiles, quite frankly. It’s gentle, literate, and deftly musical; it also owes almost its entire existence to Britain in the early 90s, in particular the shoegazers and Radiohead.

In its weaker moments, 'Dwell' is about as bog standard as you can get in indie rock – a weedy voiced guy moaning blearily about girls over formulaic guitars’n’bass’n’drums. One or two of their songs sound like run-of-the-mill ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ facsimiles, and are worth precisely nothing. When the band hit their strides, though, using ostensibly the same formula, they begin to sound pretty majestic. They’ve perfected a beautiful loping, ringing guitar sound, and an engaging, propulsive song structure, while singer Luke has a much better voice than most of the chancers who make up his peers.

Their style perhaps has the propensity to get samey, and one can’t imagine them getting it to work for a second album, but that’s hardly the point. There is more killer than filler on the album and while its no modern classic, it’s definitely worth your attention.

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