If until now there has been a glaring chasm in your life marked ‘Raggle Taggle Post Punk Eighties Glasgow Guitar Pop – with fiddles’ then look up dear reader, look up and feel the warm sun on your face: Roscoe Vacant, to say nothing of the ever helpful Screichs, are here plug that gap; plug your gap with an enthusiastic jiggle.
Which is possibly the most sexually ambiguous, actually flat out suggestive, thing ever to be said about vaguely trad Scottish music; albeit with nods to more gritty and edgy pretence.
The five-piece definitely spend a lot of time sounding like they could happily soundtrack the meanderings of toothless, rural hags and crones, but then groovily chuck in a taught effort like ‘Conrad Brooks’, which is really quite good – if a slight disappointment by not being a guitar based attack on ex-crim and ex-Telegraph owner Conrad Black as was first expected… now that is something any sane member of society should wish to own.
It’s a rude bassline-lead affair and gains points for interrupting the traditional aspects of jolly old Alba and affronting it with a well-needed kick in the proverbials.
All of this fusion – we must, at the end of the day, call it that – is, I guess, a good thing in that it reinvigorates a popular but culturally relatively moribund Celtic genre: not an easy thing to pull of as successfully as here – a recent hearing of bagpipe techno is not to be recommended [it actually is but possibly not for the reasons the creators would hope].
It’s still a relatively safe and polite affair rather than a blast in the face of the musical landscape; it does after all ape The Pogues spunky abuse of Irish music from all those years ago; albeit with less intimidating teeth.
That said, it’ll do well in the febrile Caledonia currently thrusting its loins at the world, but in the end it’s just thoroughly decent tunes with a good voice by Mr. Vacant himself, [presumably] a good heart and an easy soundtrack to a boozy evening in the pub.
An NME reader in a kilt shall love it; this reviewer gives it a pleased but slightly cursory wave and invites it to a family get together oop north then asks if the master tapes for anything less suited to obligatory drinking of Black Isle ale are available yet.
If this was the 80’s, Postcard Records would be on the phone asking if they could ditch the violins and knock up a 7″ for them – perhaps a shame as, though the embracing of all things Scotland is a little overwhelming at times, tracks like ‘The Homecoming’ (the undoubted highpoint) become more and more attractive with repeated listens.
Full marks for the name, though it does bring to mind Deliverance a touch; which brings to mind a certain scene, which conjures up… ah no, not that again…
The Wrong Shall Fail by Roscoe Vacant and The Screichs
Words: Vosne LePro
