Spring King - Tell Me If You Like To

The Guardian 60

(Island)

Here’s another album to suggest that sparky, spiky British indie bands are finding a way to pull themselves out of the landfill, even if it’s still the landfill that offers the greatest commercial rewards. This Mancunian quartet’s stock in trade is a racket pitched somewhere between post-punk and garage rock, with guitars subjected to delicious amounts of distortion. That’s down to their leader Tarek Musa, a producer who has spoken of being obsessed with “anything over the top and used in excess amounts”. Inevitably for a debut album, Tell Me If You Like To leans heavily on the singles already released – Demons, Who Are You?, Rectifier, The Summer and Detroit, which is a lot of previously released material for a 10-track, 36-minute album – but it’s all delivered with intensity. The closer, Heaven, a hard but melodic chug, shows there’s more to them than a barbarous yawp of noise.