Wednesday 12th October 2011

FAIREWELL – “BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN”

“Born Under A Bad Sign” feels a lot like an antidote, or an indirect response, or perhaps just an inevitable result of too much of something else. But not because it’s wildly out of step. There are common signifiers that remain. There’s a sleepy-eyed longing shrouded in the requisite new-band-on-the-internet mystery which isn’t exactly rare right now. But the subject matter itself is a little less zeitgeist and as such, the main source of intrigue.

Possessing a lyrical directness increasingly absent in much new music, Fairewell evokes winter here in the UK right now, not summer on the west coast sometime late last century, built under the swell of a less vivacious OMD. There’s specific moments and places – petrol station forecourts, automatic doors, supermarket ennui and blankets of snow – constructing the contours of a personality, of a person not hiding away in a bedroom, but one trying to engage with the world in all of its wonder and absurdity and shitness.

There isn’t a clear breakaway from current trends. Fairewell, as the name would suggest, is nostalgic, like many of its peers. But unlike said peers, it’s not for another era they long. It’s for the real lived moments of the immediate past, slipping into tomorrow’s jokes and regrets and just being alive. I’d call that looking backwards to progress.

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(Photo: Leonardo Correa Luna)