Falkirk-now-Glasgow locals Pleasure Heads are set to place a solid ear worm in your head for the 2020 Northern summer with their new single Cosmopolis.
Despite a lockdown as dramatic and all-encompassing as that experienced across the UK, these four guys who need a haircut have not let a simple thing like restriction of movement stymie their output. The beginning of the year saw them touring their native Scotland on shows planned with Stoned Immaculate, Ghostbaby, Vandal Palace, Virtues, White Lines, the Stereo festival, and many, many more being added until the virus cancelled, or at least postponed everything.
But onward they pushed with singles “Sick of the Sights” (March), “Next of Kin” (an acoustic Alvvays cover for April), and “War and Orange Juice” and “Middle Man” (May) to keep us all bopping along, and all variously available through their socials and media platforms.
But they were saving the big guns for now. Musically, Cosmopolis is jingly guitars in the truest Brit-pop/indie sense with a strong rhythm-section and a hook you’ll think is on repeat but is actually your brain running it in a loop that you’ll be pleased won’t be going away any time soon. That chorus is as close 20-plus years later to how Pulp / Blur divided the music scene in the 1990s; almost Disco 2000 with its melody.
Lyrically, it lets rip at the immediacy of social networking and technology and our apparent inability to live for the moment without having to record and share it somehow with everyone you know and those in your circles that you don’t. Does that go for music reviews as well guys?
The cover art is a 1959 painting “Traffic of the Future” by the late German futurist Klaus Bürgle as the cover-art that depicts how we should be living now more accurately than Spielberg did in 1985! This combines with the underlying Fritz Lang “Metropolis” feel of the song from 1920s German futurism.
From the ears of producers Chris Marshall (Gerry Cinnamon, The Dunts, Spyres) and Johnny Madden (Baby Strange) comes Pleasure Heads “Cosmopolis“. Hopefully signs of an album that brings all of this, and more, together and soon!