The Dawn Parade : The Underground
(Sugartown)
The Underground, the latest single from Cambridge's epic
pop heroes The Dawn Parade, is a slab of beautiful, sweeping pop music
which wants to pick you up off the floor, soothe the ache and guide
you home. Speaking of longing and determined innocence, of the hurt
and the promise of continuing to hope despite it all, The Underground
calls for the listener to throw in their lot with daydreams, with the
vague but seductive call of Something More behind the day to day.
This single is a tribute to low-rent beauty and gutter romance on a
shoestring budget, to drunken foolishness and erratic coping mechanisms.
It's the urge to blow the rent on another night out and the promise
it might hold, and the satisfaction of knowing that even if that promise
didn't manifest itself, at least you know you weren't sitting at home
wondering whether it might have. It gives voice to the difficulty of
keeping your mind open enough to see beauty when life shoves it in front
of you, and to the
frustration and desperation of knowing the answer must be somewhere
nearby and feeling that you can almost see the truth disappearing around
the next
corner. It embodies both hope and disappointment; both the searing fire
of longing and the howling ache that is that fire's flipside. The Dawn
Parade
sing with a bright clarity of treading the line between the stubborn
pull of the familiar and the longing for a new, transcendent salvation.
Emptiness and craving; hope and belief; frantically running "From
falling star to falling star" to a widescreen soundtrack of chiming
guitars, big drums and the soft, aching spaces between the sounds.
This is a wide-eyed, honest and heartfelt homage to hope, belief and
a deeper truth - a homage which doesn't sink to the level of cliché
and leave the sour aftertaste of aspartame on the palate. For all those
hopeless romantics who are determined never to let go of their daydreams
and who cling to their unrealistic expectations of life, who know that
the serial disappointment of continuing to hope will always be better
than giving in to the greyness of accepting their lot, The Dawn Parade
are a clarion call to arms.
Holl(i)y
Now here's an alternative view from the pen of Anna
Claxton
THE DAWN PARADE- The Underground
It doesn't really matter what I write here because this is a band which
has been endorsed by the late John Peel and Rolling Stone magazine to
name but a few, not to mention our very own Debbie Davies being counted
among the many avid fans which sell out shows here, there and everywhere.
I hadn't heard them until now, being something more than an indie follower
these days, and not one to generally pay attention to hype of any kind.
Although I want to believe. I really do.
But I am harder to please than most and, through no amount of trying
to totally enjoy every second of this three-track offering, after several
listens I have to admit that I am, unfortunately, unconvinced. Because
this is a release which, to me, screams out "haven't I heard this
before?". Anthemic passion: check; meaningful and working-class
lyrical content that no rebellious adolescent will be able to ignore:
check; slightly Manic Street Preacher-inspired melodious rock, check,
check and check. It's not great either that the singer sounds like a
parody of Bob Geldof meets Mark from The Levellers meets another drunken-sounding
singer I can't place right now.
Still, perhaps it also doesn't help that I am possibly the only person
in Cambridge not to have seen The Dawn Parade live and perhaps if I
do then I would understand and appreciate them a little more. Until
then, they will remain something of a musical cliché.
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