Started A Fire - One Night Only Album Review

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Album Review

Having planted seeds of intrigue in minds of the indie crew, through a tour in support of The Pigeon Detectives, North East foragers One Night Only seek to harvest the fruits of this interest through their ten track debut album of disco tainted, melody based and life assessing indie. Signs are appearing to indicate that they could become 2008’s Air Traffic. In the sense that they do enough to build upon and wander off from, their aching, melodic indie grind of a foundation. With the use of climbing keyboards akin to Duke Special in It’s About Time and You and Me, demonstrating such adventure. Also, some funky Style Council flavour brass emboldens the range, stopping the quintet from sinking into a wound licking, complaint-heavy rut.

A brittle and twining Billy Bragg flavoured intro’ gives He’s There some spice and broadness, allowing George Craig to give his vocals a hurried, slightly frantic nudge to draw out paranoia and jealousy. Given the range, pitch and cohesion on offer, even the customary pleading plunge, Time retains some freshness and its bleeding heart nature is communicated with an earthy friendliness. The cheese factor nearly gets toppled through Sweet Sugar, but set against the rest of the climbing explorative releases, it just adds to the completeness of a debut album that will stay on play lists longer than many this year. The sold out signs are going up at several venues on their biggest headline tour to date this January through to March. One Night Only could make these months the winter of melodic discontent.

David Adair