Sundara Karma - Youth Is Only Ever Fun in Retrospect

The Guardian 40

(RCA)

While other genres shape-shift with the zeitgeist, each year brings one anointed guitar group – a gang of young blokes in leather jackets intent on dragging mid-noughties NME cover stars into the present day. Following Catfish and the Bottlemen and Blossoms, 2017’s leaders of the “real music” revival are Reading’s Sundara Karma.

Their music groans with inevitability, with the Killers’ pious preachery, and the chugging earnestness of clean-shaven-era Kings of Leon. Frontman Oscar Pollock’s voice is a passionate yet juddering nasal union of the Maccabees’ Orlando Weeks and Starsailor’s James Walsh. Their lyrics indulge in the sort of social commentary the 1975 would probably relegate to the draft folder (“Wild eyes, skinny jeans, disengaged at just 19”). The highlight is Flame, a send up of consumer capitalism: funky and Foals-like, with icy production; a song placed in the middle of an album that glides rather than fights its way into the future.

The Guardian 40

RCA

Looking like rock gods-in-waiting is unlikely to do Berkshire four-piece Sundara Karma much harm, and neither is frontman Oscar Pollock’s androgynous image. It’s a shame, then, that their songs are so much less noteworthy. Their debut album starts brightly enough, the Foals-like Loveblood fizzing with energy and the harmonies of Happy Family’s intro evoking Fleet Foxes. They fail to sustain the quality throughout, however, and too often seem to have set a course for Arcade Fire transcendence only to end up mired in Coldplay/Mumfords stadium-indie mediocrity. There’s promise here, but ultimately too little to mark them out from the rest of the pack.