The Long Blondes
“Couples”
(Rough Trade, 2008)

The Long Blondes’ debut album Someone to Drive You Home dropped fully formed, with cinematic glamour and caustic descriptions of domestic disappointment accrued over the course of the usual years of toil and early singles. “Couples”, made in the wake of the dissolution of multiple relationships within the band (hence the quotation marks), refines the group’s lyrical ambivalence about adulthood, particularly romance—the winnowing of possibilities on one hand and the often illusory promise of sexual freedom on the other.

And with DJ-turned-producer Erol Alkan handling things, it also expands their sound to the further-spreading branches of the post-punk family tree. But it’s shorter and less cohesive (factors perhaps attributable to “Couples” having a shorter running start than Someone to Drive You Home, especially the latter’s B-side-loaded US release), the kind of album that’d make you excited for what the Long Blondes were capable of doing, if they hadn’t already done it.

Frontwoman/fashion plate Kate Jackson gets most of the attention for the band’s lyrics, probably because it’s hard to imagine that the first-person narrators she so fiercely embodies could be anyone else’s creations. But they are—a dude’s, in fact, specifically guitarist/keyboardist Dorian Cox, who’d probably feel validated to know that a lady friend of mine let out a gasp of recognition during “Nostalgia” when Jackson confesses, “I may never have a daughter ‘cos I’ve far too much to tell her.” Diamond-hard gems glitter throughout the lyric sheet: “Erin O’Connor” inserts the titular model’s name into the old “close your eyes and think of England” advice for enduring sexual duties, one of many lines alluding to the bonds—the bindings—of partnership. In “Guilt”, Jackson tells a one-night stand she’s sticking with her boyfriend, “and guilt has nothing, nothing to do with it.” (Cox’s narrators are often unreliable, too.) Semi-title track “The Couples” isn’t happy about the paired state—or the single life, either: Jackson announces she wants no part of the paired life and notes that “the couples walk by and they give me the eye / And I can see that the girl’s just a little bit jealous” of her untethered existence; but she quickly moves on to lamenting: “These people have the nerve to tell me that they’re lonely / You’re not lonely, I am, baby.”

However, the song’s first line is actually, “Falling in love is sometimes hard / Writing a love song is even harder,” which gets right to the core of the undeniable Fleetwoodmackian tension of the whole enterprise—twisted a bit, not just by Jackson’s defiantly, desperately sexy delivery, but also by the knowledge that she’s the sole member of the five-piece who hasn’t recently broken up with a bandmate.

So the dynamic is piled-on. Why does “Couples” feel so distracted? Opening track and lead single “Century” is their “Heart of Glass”, only pockmarked with all the aggression to hit dance (and punk variations) music since, beginning with the first Gang of Four record the year after—fair enough? But what of the extended, smug falsetto vamp “Too Clever by Half”, or the bumpy cul-de-sac of noise-y “’Round the Hairpin”? Alkan, who’d previously done some of Someone to Drive You Home’s B-sides, takes over for Pulp’s Steve Mackey, and his production gives a distinctly clubby sheen to the proceedings—giving “Guilt”, in particular, a sly hedonistic spin—but there’s little to be done with a quickie like “I Liked the Boys.”

The best tracks on the album sound like continuations of Someone to Drive You Home, with the reckless formula prodded out onto the dance floor for everyone to see. The piano-as-percussion instrument closer “Going to Hell” demands attention; “Here Comes the Serious Bit”, which bites the fuzzed-out, horn-sounding guitar wraparound hook of the Cardigans’ “My Favourite Game” (swear to god) is a slick floor-filler without sacrificing any of the jagged skepticism of the band’s top material.

No shit, when the Blondes are in their sonic wheelhouse, “Couples” is a freakishly intense, engrossing spectacle, a mess whose Facebook page you check daily: But, too much of the time—and with Someone to Drive You Home still fresh and large-looming in memory—it sounds like they’re having rebound flings with other genres. Take some time off, guys, really let it sit for a while, and come back when you’re ready to address the subject with the kind of fearsome intelligence we love about you.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Other articles by Mark Asch:

Album review of Destroyer, Trouble in Dreams

Album review of Goldfrapp, Seventh Tree

Album review of the Big Sleep, Sleep Forever