Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

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.

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