Electric Lights Flashing Very Fast: Let There Be Lights EP

Electric Lights Flashing Very Fast
Let There Be Lights EP
Cult-Hero
2006-08-19

Let There Be Lights starts with a blocky riff that seems familiar. Is that… hey, have they been listening to “Lust For Life”? Nice choice of inspiration. I like it. But as the EP continues, through “Never Been to London” and “Up Where We Belong”, another influence asserts itself. That influence is Britrock. The sound gets both hard and fuzzy, and, even though the band is American, the singer’s voice takes on an edge of repressed aggression — suggesting that we might be friends now but things could turn nasty quickly if he wanted them to — similar to the one you might hear in Blur’s frontman, Damon Albarn. It’s an exciting sound but not an inclusive one. It would rather thunder down on you than bring you up to its level. Still, Electric Lights Flashing Very Fast is a talented group of thunderers, well able to wind up their music and send it bursting over you in jellied, semi-psychedelic waves. (The whirling, screwing, and descending guitars pushing against one another at the end of “Darwinian Begin Again” are great.)

RATING 7 / 10