The Subways - Young For Eternity (City Pavement/Infectious) 04/07/05

Almost a year to the day after performing at Glastonbury as the Unsigned Band Competition winners and a week after making a triumphant return to Worthy Farm (despite the weather doing its best to stop them!) The Subways release their debut album ‘Young For Eternity’. With both their first two singles ‘Oh Yeah’ and ‘Rock & Roll Queen’ being three minutes of spine tingling, reckless rock you’d expect the rest of this long player to follow the same lines. However, while in places this is true there is more than enough on this album to prove that there is more than one string to The Subways bow...

The surprises begin from the first bar of ‘I Want To Hear What You Have Got To Say’ which starts out as a melodic acoustic (We didn’t even know acoustic was in Billy Lunn’s vocabulary) affair before turning into the full on stomp of The Subways we have become accustomed to. While ‘Holiday’ and title track ‘Young For Eternity’ encompass The Subways initial appeal in being full on sexy grunge rock n roll, the likes of ‘She Sun’ and the hauntingly beautiful ‘Lines Of Light’ show that as a band they have a more melodic side and a maturity beyond their young years.

True, you could criticise Billy Lunn’s lack of intricacy within his lyrics, never more apparent than on the ultra naïve but ever endearing ‘Mary’ which opens with the lines "Mary is my best friend, She makes me my tea, She lets me stay around her place when there’s nowhere else to be", it is the simplicity of The Subways approach to their music which is refreshing to hear. It contains no air or graces, no pretensions - plain and simply - it just rocks! The Subways are a band that have energy to burn and they let it out in all the right places.

It would seem that some bearded bloke on a farm in Somerset did us all a favour when last year he picked The Subways from relative obscurity and cast them into the limelight. ‘Young For Eternity’ is a rollicking, raucous, rowdy, riotous - and anymore adjectives being with R you can think of - debut which truly justifies the bands ‘Next Big Thing’ tag which was pinned on them by many. Get your air guitar out, put this CD in your stereo and rock the **** out like your Charlotte Cooper all night long. Oh Yeah!