EP Review: Lovelife – Stateless
When critics deride a band for being too “bland”, “formulaic”, or just plain “boring”, the biggest mistake that band can often make is to wave the big white flag, and call it a day. However, in Lovelife’s case, they turned the whole ordeal of Viva Brother’s messy demise on its head, taking some time to harvest a bunch of new songs before reappearing under a new name. As for those new songs: ‘Gritpop’? No. ‘Ladrock’? Certainly not. No, the Lovelife chaps have emerged, clad in black, residing in Brooklyn, NY, and proffering a direction that is, for all intents and purposes, synth-pop.
No matter which way you look at it, the regeneration is ludicrously ambitious. Which makes Stateless’ such a compelling listen. Their third release, it’s perhaps their fullest, most well-rounded effort, bridging a gap between some of their earliest, rough-and-ready material, to the kind of shiny, polished pop they seem to be heading towards with every waking chord change.
‘Midnight Swimming’ is euphoric in mood and dramatic in theme, as the first words of the whole EP being the urgent utterance that, “there’s no time to tell you everything I wanted to“, as staccato percussion meets brooding synth-work worthy of Hurts’ debut album. Frontman Lee Newell finally seems to have found a genre that fits his voice, and his often dry writing style. “We were alive but we weren’t living” might be the sort of car bumper sticker for the Tumblr/hashtag/YOLO/selfie generation, but it fits the reflective nature of the track – certainly an apt sentiment, given the circumstances.
The title track relies on that familiar yet foreboding sense of passing as in many of the band’s lyrics, with an impressive falsetto singing the words, “It won’t be long until I’m dead and gone/I’m falling but I’m holding on” over a pulsating drumbeat and atmospheric piano playing, while ‘Exhaler’ and ‘Dying to Start Again’ are probably two of the finest RnB ballads you’re likely to hear this year.
Lovelife seem to fit better into the current climate than Viva Brother ever would have, a grand accomplishment given this year’s penchant for guitar rock acts. Providing a male-voice counterpart to the hugely successful AlunaGeorge and CHVRCHES, their sound remarkably suits them, and it’s no wonder they’ve been selling out shows across the US, a trend that looks set to continue all over the world in the not-too-distant future.
– Mark Riley
