Review | English Teacher – This Could Be Texas

Label: Island Records

By Joe Day

I’m sat with my legs up on the bed playing some video games when I first hear ‘This Could Be Texas‘. It’s the debut album of English Teacher, a band that, according to almost everybody else on the internet, is wholly confident, up and coming and generally about to reshape the British music industry. My girlfriend and I agree after coming to the end of the fifty minute runtime that we both feel pretty old and out of touch before flicking off the TV and saying goodnight.

I’m thinking about the whole sordid affair the next day whilst I’m browsing for asparagus in Sainsbury’s. The album’s unquestionably attention-grabbing from a technical perspective; there’s a harmonic dissonance to the chord voicing (which at times creates a striking resemblance to Dry Cleaning), and the lyrical deliveries of Lily Fontaine throughout the album evoke a dry dramatism not so unlike that of Black Country, New Road’s Isaac Wood.

A great deal of the rhythmic content is complex enough to entertain, but grounded enough to not throw you off, and the sheer sonic variety on offer is borderline staggering for a debut. I’m a little gutted not to have been caught up in the hype of it all, and to have only staggered across them after the fact.

Once the fridge is restocked and I’m shot of anything else to do, I realise I’ve been avoiding finding things to actually say about the album. I don’t even like asparagus that much. I decide to splash myself with water and face my fears. I sit down, stick the headphones on and go to give the fucker a proper, uninterrupted listen. There’s no use casting the whole thing aside just because I feel a bit out of the loop.

Soon I’m lost in some kind of musical trance. Up until ‘Nearly Daffodils’ comes sprinting into the room with the jolly rimshots of its happy-go-lucky opening, time seems to stand still. The dryness of Fontaine’s delivery isn’t just a mimicking act that suits the style; you can genuinely tell she’s running a tight ship where the lyrical content of English Teacher’s art is concerned.

Her words are so perfectly appropriate when placed within the context of their delivery. She doesn’t deploy sprechgesang for the memorable line “Can a river stop its banks from bursting? // Blame the council, not the rain” for the sake of being quirky. It, like the rest of the album’s lyrical performance, is deliberate and calculated. It really hits the spot.

Speaking of performance, let’s talk about ‘Albatross‘. For an opener, it’s absolutely wonderful. Rather than deadpan murmurings, Fontaine introduces you to the world of English Teacher with a voice smooth and soft as butter, but with a fragility that implies there’s more to the story than she’s letting on.

The crystal clear guitar lines; the piano gently fluttering about in the background; the playful moments of production (courtesy of Marta Salogni (Bjork, Bon Iver, M.I.A.): it’s all a masterclass of restraint and control that eventually allows ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab‘ to come out swinging and take you to the outer reaches of the universe with all the washy dream-pop relish you could hope for.

When I first heard ‘Best Tears of Your Life’ midway through gunning down some poor bastard on the Playstation, I hated it. The autotune seemed grating and tacky, and stuck out like a sore thumb against the rest of the album. Now I think it’s one of the album’s most outstanding moments.

Something about it reminds me of Sorry; maybe it’s how bloody downtrodden it feels in the grungy bass melody and how goddamn oppressive the whole soundscape ends up as the song enters its climax. It’s got anger behind it, but Fontaine’s matter-of-fact plainness holds the whole cacophony up, refusing to let it descend into anarchy. It is blood-boiling aggression incarnate, held to the highest esteem.

This isn’t just some pretty little post-punk project thrown together by a bunch of artsy Leeds Conservatoire graduates. English Teacher have talent. ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’ is undeniably the most striking, delicious single the album has on offer, and ‘This Could Be Texas’ acts as the perfect aperitif at the album’s almost-mid-point-come-titular-track, yet it is as a whole that the band’s debut album shines brightest.

You have to meet them halfway, and put as much consideration, attention and respect into the listening experience as the band clearly did writing it. The ripped-up chorus-ridden guitars bathe you in warm waters if you’re brave enough to take the plunge, and Fontaine will gladly lead you back to the waters edge once she’s told you what you need to know.