At last! The Leif Ericsson's debut album has been a looooooooong time coming – longer than the Pylon album, the One Car Pile-Up album, Stone Roses' 'The Second Coming' and The Chinese Democracy put together! (Note: may be exaggeration). And, even then, they couldn't even be bothered to think of a title for it, the lazy layabouts. So, was it worth the wait? Read on and find out! I'm not going to tell you in the first paragraph, am I?
Probably the only band ever to be named after a Norse explorer who lived 1,000 years ago (cheers Wikipedia), the Leif Ericsson play straight-up singalong melodic punk in the vein of Snuff, which isn't too surprising considering that singer Will Farley (from 'Anchorman' and the inventor of the rusk) is also in Dogpiss and Billy No Mates with Snuff's Duncan Redmonds (husband of New Tricks actress Amanda). There's not a bad song amongst the eleven, my “special favourites” being the anthemic 'Göttingen', 'Aquaplane', 'Twelve Years in the Making' (probably about how long it's taken them to actually get around to releasing an album) and live favourite 'Little Pink Socks'.
As you can probably tell by the way I'm padding this review out with sentences like this one which you are reading now and which you are still reading even now and which should probably have had a comma or two in it already, I don't really have that much to write about this album, which in no way reflects its quality: if you enjoy melodic UK punk stuff then this should be at the top of your CD shopping list (assuming you've got the Great St Louis CD already, of course). If this had been released ten years ago when Fat Mike was in his Anglophile phase then no doubt he'd have been sniffing around them, but Fat Wreck's loss is Bombed Out's gain, I guess. The Leif Ericsson have been one of my favourite UK punk bands since I first saw them about four years ago, and this album was definitely worth waiting for.
To finish off, here are some Leif Ericson facts:
- Born c970, died c1020
- Lived in Iceland
- Thought to be the first European to land in North America
- Took a bloody age to record his first alb(that's enough Leif Ericson facts. Ed)
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