Music - Part 60 - The Wind-Up Birds

The City of Leeds has got it good.  The Wind-Up Birds are pretty good, well, they’re very good.  In fact, let’s just say they’re rather wonderful.

Musically, the songs are huge slabs of punk/indie/pop.  Lyrically they are something else – Northern lads writing stunning poetry which is funny, serious and relevant.     Imagine John Cooper-Clarke taking lead vocal with The Arctic Monkeys and you won’t be far wrong.  What makes the words so entertaining is the pure honesty and everyday observations.  It’s like someone is reading your mind about what you see, what you think, what you feel.

Current album, The Land, is packed with eleven absolute gems.  From the opening Good Shop Shuts, (making you feel guilty that you didn’t really support the good old record shop when it was there, and, now you’re lazily lamenting its absence), you are in ‘normal street’.  This is where Northern life lives and where we all have things to say but are too scared to say it.  There Won’t Always Be An England is nothing short of brilliant and beautifully (sic) describes the pub racist.

The track Nostalgic For.... doesn’t even bother to set itself out as a song as such.  It’s a passage telling of the return to a birth-town and realising the awfulness.  “And you wonder why I’m so fucked up”.

In some ways it’s wrong to tag The Wind-Up Birds as ‘New Artist’ as they’ve been around for years, releasing  several albums already (The Land is the first physical one), and, a string of singles.  It’s also a shame that it took something like Twitter, courtesy of Shiny Rhino, to bring them to my attention.  They should be household names already.

You really should do yourself a favour and listen to this lot.  Better still, redeem yourself after listening to Good Shop Shuts and buy the cd here.

Visit The Wind-Up Birds’ website here.  Follow them on Twitter here and do Facebook things here.

Published on Louder Than War 20/03/13 - http://louderthanwar.com/new-artist-of-the-day-the-wind-up-birds/