Brakes - 'Touchdown' (Fatcat) Released 20/04/09

OK, so you’ve all heard the story by now. Twee indie band meets rocking indie band, indie bands fall in love and make beautiful indie rock kid. It’s been nearly six years since that fateful night when Electric Soft Parade’s Alex and Thomas White first set eyes upon British Sea Powers Eamon Hamilton, yet Brakes find themselves still stuck to the confines of the BBC 6 music playlist.

Their third album comes in the shape of the aptly titled ‘Touchdown’. Opening song ‘Two Shocks’, is reminiscent of the Beta Band at their anthemic indie best. It begins as a quiet unobtrusive song, but slowly builds and builds into a massive charging force. After a little pause to come down, ‘Don’t Take Me to Space (Man)’ once again sees Eamon skewing traditional themes for lyrics. Never before has a love song contained the line ‘I don’t care that this world’s corrupted / I don’t want to be abducted’.

As you would expect, the album is a heady mix of classic indie song writing, like the Belle and Sebastian style pop of ’Worry About It Later’, and brash rock songs like ‘Hey Hey’. However, the album’s main strength is the sheer quality of the song writing. ‘Crush on you’ and ‘Do you Feel The Same’ are perfect indie pop tunes which will be accompanying BBQs all summer long. Eamon may have fallen in love but thankfully, he hasn’t done a ‘Preston’ and let it destroy his song writing, instead it has added substance to his already superb song writing ability.

On this album Brakes have clearly ‘Touchdown’ from wherever their psychedelic base was, and served up an album which leans more toward the mainstream and less to the leftfield – anyone who remembers ‘Chaney’ will know what I’m on about- yet still has enough rocking moments and absurd lyrics to keep fans happy. Hopefully it will see them get the recognition they deserve.