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Blood Red Shoes

Fire Like This

Label: Co-Operative/V2

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No longer the teenage outfit, Blood Red Shoes have blossomed into the philosophical phase of their career, but not before dragging by the fist the bitching temperamental bag of hormones as their tattooed music legacy. Named after a David Lynch marathon of Twin Peaks and film, Fire Walk With Me (1992), Fire Like This is a ear-choke of a record, half made in frustration; half in confused contemplation. No wonder, it’s their second attempt to prove to those prickly British critics that they WILL conquer UK shores.

Best served blasted into wax free lugholes, Fire Like This reveals its purpose admittedly after a few plays, and by that point you’ve already associated every pissed off, aggressive, melancholy moment to  each hard earned track. In the opener ‘Don’t Ask’ releasing seemingly BRS riffs, Steve’s sardonic snarl rolls off “You’ve got more to learn” introducing the band’s retrospective stab at themselves. While they remark of Box of Secrets “we realised we sounded like little children”, Fire Like This evidently is without the drastic “Is that really The Horrors?” change we’ve experienced in the last year; it is furiously different, but reflects a band still progressing in their career.

Winning us over is their downright blasé attitude to whatever is happening in music right now; they still listen to nineties grunge rock and it bleeds brightly through the poignant tracks in the sophomore album. Stemming from loves of Queens of the Stones Age, Laura’s overworked guitar pierces shallow finger picks into loaded baselines in ‘Light It Up’, drowned out by waves of crowd-pleasing shouts “LIGHT. IT. UP”.

After the despairing ‘It Is Happening Again’; a track charged with maddening hooks and lyrical annoyance “I can’t breathe, the words aren’t coming so easily”, a first for the Brighton act is the softer number ‘When We Wake’. Before ending with haunted Pixies howling, Laura’s vocals surface through her trademark bitter shouts as ghostly and gentle, perfect for split gasps “Bro-Ken” accentuation and the crescendo repetition of “In the end is this all we can ask for? Breathing every day and night/Just waiting”.

Whether delving into morbid meditation in ‘When We Wake’, Nirvana rolling riffs in ‘One More Empty Chair’ or thrashing cymbal cries in ‘Keeping It Close’, Blood Red Shoes channel through countless off kilter textures in what people forget, is just a guitar-drums combination. Ending with Laura's vocal gasps over visceral a guitar solo in the final favourite ‘Colours Fade’ Fire Like This manifests further reasons why the future of Blood Red Shoes is crowning oh-so-close to their much awaited peak. - Gemma Dempster