DON’T MOVE!
DON’T MOVE! will be playing at End Of The Road Festival 2010. Buy your tickets now!
“Don’t hesitate to stop me if I’m boring you,” begs Mason Le Long, his falsetto dangling above a fiery drumroll. The 23-year-old guitarist / singer and 22-year-old bassist, Joe Carvell, are the songwriting team behind DON’T MOVE!, a chancy and downright blastful new quarter rising from The Midlands. And their debut album, The New Pop Sound of DON’T MOVE!, is anything but boring. Produced by American songwriter / guitarist Paul Curreri (producer of Devon Sproule’s new album, Don’t Hurry For Heaven), and released on Coventry’s Tin Angel Records, The New Pop Sound is an electrifying ball.
Love, The Byrds, The Beatles, Scott Walker. “Yeah, definitely all those,” Carvell confirms. “I remembering listening to Ahmad Jamal and Jaco Pastorius when Mason & I first met about five years back. Mase grew up with his sister’s 80s collection, plus his dad’s folk and bluegrass LPs. He always said the best musical experience of his life was when he had a joint and listened to a Clarence White solo record. He saw the light.”
The interplay between DON’T MOVE!’s guitar & bass is the first thing you notice. Le Long picks with an explosive urgency, his jagged angles orbiting rather conventional chord structures, skipping around, leaning way forward. Carvell’s liquid basslines—so expressive, so conversational—are as rocking, as brilliant, as they are thematically crucial. Tough stuff for what is indisputably a pop record.
Lyrically, the songs tend to revolve around failed, failing, and soon-to-surely-fail romantic relationships. The usual bag! But there’s a surprisingly original voice here. Le Long presents a narrator whose take on the situation is almost comically clinical, as sweepingly uncertain as it is controlled – like some monocled professor having tea in the cockpit of a tailspinning plane. And yet, perhaps due to his unaffected baritone, or perhaps due to the strangely well-rounded delivery of his warped and bitter case, somehow you can’t help but side with him. Somebody seems to have been quite the bitch.
But wait one minute: “Don’t believe what you hear about me and my dear girlfriend. / We only disagree because of her opinion of me is usually wrong.” he sings in Love Her Dearly, atop George Vaughn’s ballistic drumming. Maybe it is his business. He’s the one standing on the freezing doorstep in Let Me In— not us —pleading to his pissed-off lady, “What if I told you that it’s hard for me to apologize to you? / Surely that’s got to count for something!” Apparently not. “Now you want me to leave. / But then who’s gonna grieve over the death of what we had?” Still, it’s hard not to judge the lass: “You promised me your love / on a bowling green like some summer dream,” he sings. “So surely, you can see / why the thought of you with him repulses me.” (The Bowling Green )
And while it might be polite to look away, we can’t help but bob our heads as it all comes crumbling down: “The words you squeezed through the gaps in your teeth just cracked right beneath us. And threads to which we had to cling – such fragile little things / snapped when I tried to bring your hand to meet them.” And finally, “the solace in the night” evaporates, “roars down that hill with a most aggressive chill” and “rips through the alley / to the shops where kids sell magazines / to the ugliest man they’ve ever seen.” (A Poor Crutch)
It wasn’t meant to be. The thermostat is never set correctly. Romantic ambitions never line up right. Even the girl’s mother gets in the way (She Only Went To Hang The Washing Out), as our protagonist scrambles to find his clothes, the razor-toothed matriarch who ain’t “too keen on my presence,” outside, heading in. “It’s a good job your windows are double-glazed,” he cries, “and your father’s gun collection is all the way upstairs. / It might buy a bit more time.”
Sonically, producer Paul Curreri, who took the raw tracks back to his home in Charlottesville for completion, has not only lassoed the youthful passion and turned-on euphoria of the group, but mirrored that with truly dynamic production. Pianos & organs, guitars everywhere, accordions, saxophones like fog horns, French horns rolling over and into each other, a bar of beat-boxing next door to flashes of psychedelia, plates dropping, and a ton of tambourine. Doo-wop by way of The Smiths. Middle-Eastern riffs by way of 60s-UK rock.
