Our Girl - Stranger Today - LP ORANGE VINYL + BONUS 12" (2018)
£
24
$
32
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Description
BRAND NEW AND SEALED.
Limited orange vinyl album includes additional bonus 12" 'Bedroom Record'.
Tracks:
Our Girl
Being Around
In My Head
I Really Like It
Josephine
Two Life
Level
Sub Rosa
I Wish It Was Sunday
Heat Boring
Despite generous airplay on BBC Radio 6 and particularly from John Kennedy on Radio X, Joe public appears to be a bit slow on the uptake regarding Our Girl's debut album 'Stranger Today'. According to singer songwriter Soph Nathan, these are the songs that she's long wanted to get off her chest and with help from Brighton based buddies Josh Tyler and Lauren Wilson , her dreams have been realised on this fine record.
Taking time out from her regular band The Big Moon, Nathan's side project sacrifices the latter's occasional playfulness in favour of a fuller, grungier sound as typified by the opening eponymous track 'Our Girl'.
Fans of the Pixies' loud / quiet technique will find much to love on this album, not least on ace track 'Level' whereby after a long, brooding Anna Calvi like intro the trio come out fighting 'Surfer Rosa' fashion in the final third, with all guns blazing.
In common with contemporaries Wolf Alice there are some tender love songs scratching beneath the surface of the misty atmospherics and shoegazey production, making the murky album cover photo very apt. Overseen by the ubiquitous Bill Ryder- Jones in the producer's chair, Our Girl rise to the occasion when he helps out with guitar duties on five of the tracks. Featuring a brilliantly prowling, circling riff, 'In My Head' showcases some nice guitar interaction between Nathan and Ryder-Jones before gaining pace towards the finishing line.
The twin guitars continue in fine style on the album's poppiest moment 'I Really Like It' which recalls Marika Hackman's droll fest 'I'm Not Your Man', a record that Nathan played on and as suggested here, perhaps contributed even more.
Sounding not unlike her fellow lunar lady Juliette Jackson on Two Life', Nathan's guitar bounces off Ryder-Jones' until one or the other performs a striking solo as the song slows down akin to a train pulling into a station. Back as a trio, 'Our Girl' wind down the grungey Breeders stop / start rock out of 'I Wish It Was Sunday' with some all too brief Staves / Stealing Sheep style harmonies that I'd like to have seen utilised more.
The albums only low point is the dullishly morose 'Heat' which is only salvaged by Nathan's studious guitar picking. Exiting with a track called 'Boring' is really asking for it, but fear not because it's anything but. Something of a mini epic, the song encapsulates all the best bits of 'Stranger Today'; the soft but memorable vocals, the solid rhythms , the juxtaposition of the visceral and the meditative.
Helped along by some tasteful drumming from Lauren Wilson, 'Boring' finds it's way home on the back of a spiralling guitar motif from Nathan that feels impossible to detach yourself from. And why would you want to?
Our Girl have generated a body of work that is undeserving of the indifference currently being shown towards it , and I trust that situation will change very soon.
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