Real Lies - Lad Ash [CD]

Format: CD
Catalogue No.: UNREAL6CD
Barcode: 5053760080725
Release Date: 10 Jun 2022
Genre:  Synth-pop

TRACKLIST:
A1 Ethos
A2 Boss Trick
A3 An Oral History Of My First Kiss
A4 Dream On

B1 Late Arcades
B2 Thameslink Tryst
B3 Dolphin Junction
B4 All Good Dogs

C1 Since I
C2 The Carousel
C3 Your Guiding Hand
C4 DiCaprio

D1 You Were In Love
D2 I Wander
D3 Oh Me, Oh My (Nicotine Patch)
D4 Birds

London electronic act Real Lies combine classic English pop-poetic story-telling with the uncanny rainswept atmospheres of auteurs like Claude Young, Drexciya and Richard D James. On their second album, lyricist Kevin Lee Kharas romanticises ecstasy-fuelled teenage joyrides that set the coordinates for two decades of thrill-seeking hedonism. A wild period that resulted in both the group’s euphoric 2015 debut Real Life and the prolonged six-year wait for its follow up.

In places, that euphoria remains – they’ve never sounded higher than on ‘Dream On’ – but generally the mood here is darker, more late-night, club-ready and ruminative. There are songs about losing childhood friends in mysterious circumstances (‘Dolphin Junction’), bandmates (‘Boss Trick’ is a wake for former member Tom Watson), childhood innocence (‘An Oral History Of My First Kiss’) and huge swathes of memory (‘The Carousel’). As the title implies, Lad Ash is a coming-of-age album that draws out the beauty and longing of the young British male experience by reframing it through an elegiac, at times almost gothic, lens.