REVIEW: New Last Name
New Last Name
- Courting
I had the pleasure of meeting both of Courting’s Seans before Christmas. At that point I’d neither listened to the band, nor recognised them, so it was only in retrospect that I realised who they were. They were lovely — very funny, very friendly and more welcoming of a stranger on their pub quiz team than I could have hoped. These guys were half of Liverpool’s answer to The Windmill Scene, so I’d been told, and excitedly I scuttled home ready for a dive into their debut album released the previous year.
Guitar Music is good — the kind of brash, dryly delivered cynicism that I tend to enjoy in whatever wave of electro-adjacent-post-punk revival we’re currently embroiled in. Much to my surprise then that their second album, New Last Name, swerves almost any inclination of the band’s former style. Among the singles released, “Throw” — the first track on the album — was performed and promoted under parody alias The Throwbecks. What were they throwing back to exactly? If the band’s outfits are anything to go by (baggy clothes and eye-shadow), the trashy pop-punk indie of the early 00s — by any metric a musical downgrade on the unashamedly pretentious technicality and edgy production of their debut. A prank, surely?
No laugh, I get the sense they’ve anticipated the reaction of someone like me. Press releases for the album anxiously pre-empt the left turn, attributing sincerity and a conceptual basis to the “theatrical play,” pleading: “We are not trying to pull the wool over your eyes. This album is sincere.” Why doesn’t it feel that way? The album is a bastardised attempt at reframing the soured vibes of Matty Healy. Sorry, Sean(s). Jangly guitars and vague electronics are totally overwhelmed by vocals drowned in autotune. Lyrics, while allegedly conceptual and overarching, are wailed in tones generally reserved for mere platitude.
Neither surpassing the threshold of deliberate obnoxiousness necessary for hyper-pop — of which fans and band alike draw comparison — nor equipped with the relentlessly streamlined production of noughties trash-punk, Courting find themselves in an unpleasant halfway house on New Last Name. A sound abrasive enough to be hard-listening, but too rigidly nostalgic to be truly boundary-pushing. Defenders of the album like to use these disparate pop influences as evidence of being “fun”. Unfortunately I can’t even afford it this label. Where guitar-led screamo-pop of years gone by can feel punchy in spite of being formulaic, songs on New Last Name play with structure just enough to out-stay their welcome and not enough to provide satisfying peaks and troughs.
My guess is Courting simply wanted to make an indie pop album and, to account for being 10 years too late, felt they had to submerge a genuine, playful nostalgia beneath measly conceptual justifications and the faux-experimentation of smothering vocals in autotune, both of which are firewalled by a layer of painful self-awareness. As you might imagine, then, it is those songs that embrace this nostalgia, away from the autotune and electronics, that are strongest. Top of this list is “Flex”, with “Happy Endings,” and “Emily G” being the calibre of your local indie club’s playlist.
New Last Name is frustrating in that this band clearly has talent, their debut proves that. Hell, even this album demonstrates their proficiency and confidence. It’s just they were attempting too great a task here: attempting a thinly-veiled experimental pop, a multifaceted sincerity… an oxymoron.