It’s no surprise the eponymous opening track on Let’s Fall Back In Love, the debut EP from sparkling Sheffield two-piece Slow Club, opens with a chorus of voices singing along with the band – anyone managing to catch the bitter-sweet northerners live in recent weeks will have been bitten by exactly the same bug.
Slow Club plough the already well worked furrows of unrequited, doomed and outright failed attempts at love over LFBIL’s five songs, but the duo neatly sidestep the pitfalls into tweeness with their plaintive, harmonious and oft-energetic discourses on emotion and loss.
Although two songs, Dance Till Morning Light and Trick Question, showcase the considerable individual talents of Charles and Rebecca respectively – the former a finger-picking folk ditty about losing out in love, the latter an Emmy The Great-like discourse on the unknowns relationships turn up – it is unquestionably together that Slow Club really make the neck hairs stand on end.
The stomping Summer Shakedown fills the album with the warm mysteries of almost being in love, but being scared to take the final step – “I’m looking for someone with binoculars so I don’t have to get so close, ‘cause that’s where the most casualties arise” – while Come On Youth’s beautiful refrain of “Cold is comfort, comfort is cold” and solitary imagery are belied by a uplifting, soaring crescendo.
The idiosyncrasies of Slow Club’s live presence – endearing shyness, impromptu jokes and a misplaced shock anyone has bothered turning up to see them at all – rarely break the surface of LFBIL, but the charming duo have ensured that once it’s in your CD player you’ll struggle to take it out.
8/10
Words: Mike Didymus