Send "Slow Club " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pastemagazine |
 A sophomore album can fall anywhere between sounding exactly like the first album, (thus risking being boring) to being radically different, which takes the chance of losing fans from a band’s original release. English folk-pop duo Slow Club find a happy medium between the extremes.Their first release, 2009’s Yeah, So, was a composition of unorthodox melodic duets about love. It was all very innocent and cinematic. Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor’s voices harmonized very softly over their guitars and a percussion of spoons, glasses and wooden chairs. Though the quirkiness of the songs was full of life, all together it all seemed rather lo-fi. Yet with the new release of Paradise the band sticks to its roots and manages to make this group of songs richer than the previous effort. This album starts with the duo singing together, though Taylor’s voice is more dominant over a drum kick. Then the strings join, and it’s clear they spent more time working on how to make their music grander without straying from their simplistic style. Watson and Taylor’s lyrics come to life over drums that are a driving force on many of the songs like lead single “Two Cousins” and “Beginners” that never manage to seem forced or frantic. They then slow things down on intimate tracks like “You, Earth Or Ash” that could have been taken from earlier material. The breathtaking ballad-like “Never Look Back” meshes both aspects of the album, making the song a haunting ode to lovers singing to one another....full text |
| Bbc |
| Being a product of the age it was written, Slow Club's 2009 debut, Yeah So, dealt with the all too familiar space between adolescence and the oncoming storm of adulthood. A boy-girl duo who played a flower-adorned chair live, they were the polar opposite of what was coming out of post-Arctic Monkeys Sheffield. Slow Club were fun, cute, whimsical and all manner of other words just shy of 'twee' – and they hate being called twee. Paradise, however, is where the duo grows up. Two years on, it stumbles out of a trivial, self-indulgent teenage malaise (where sexual adventure was priority for most) and carries itself with a sense of perspective that only adulthood can give – a darker, more thoughtful view of the world. For instance, on the poignant You, Earth or Ash, a song about Rebecca Taylor's granddad, her melancholic vocals (beautiful, as always) evoke an awareness of mortality for those around her; singing "and I know, soon you'll go," her voice seemingly breaks under the weight of premature grief. Whereas even love-wise (an inspiration every band draws from) Slow Club's lyrical output is glossed with a more mature and detached sense of sauce, with Taylor crooning on Where I'm Waking: "I can see you looking at me / You got the brains I've got the body". It's the latter, along with songs such as If We're Still Alive and The Dog, that provides Paradise’s most frantic and poppy moments, with producer Luke Smith (of the defunct Clor, and producer of Foals’ last LP) firming up the band's penchant for ramshackle drums, rattling guitars and startlingly impressive two-part harmonies; a thrown-together machine that if, not held together properly, would easily fall apart. Of course, that's not to say that, musically, this record couldn't have been made by anyone else – it's not sonically unique. Yet there's a charm here. A personality and identity that, whilst subdued compared to their live shows, bleeds through the cracks to make this album not only a snapshot of burgeoning adulthood, but also of Slow Club's singularly impressive songwriting ability....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Slow Club's first album, Yeah So, was a twee, hyper-romantic delight, full of charming little indie folk songs ideally suited to mix tapes and teen television soundtracks. The Sheffield, England duo could have kept going in that direction indefinitely with potentially great commercial rewards, but instead they've opted to make a second album, Paradise, which dials down their perky sweetness and emphasizes rhythm and atmosphere with lyrics confronting more emotionally complicated subject matter. This isn't to say that Slow Club have become unrecognizable. One of the most impressive things about Paradise is the way the band have retained so much of their character while shifting their tone considerably. A few of the songs here-- the rollicking "Where I'm Waking" and the wistful "Hackney Marsh"-- would have made sense on Yeah So, but for the most part, the melodic and lyrical sensibility of that record has been filtered through a different set of influences. There is still a sweetness to their sound, but it's balanced out with a range of more difficult emotions and a darker tonal palette. The most drastic difference between Yeah So and Paradise is that Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor have largely abandoned close harmonies. Instead, Taylor has asserted herself as the dominant vocalist, with her voice taking the lead on nearly every track, while Watson provides complementary harmonies or focuses on his guitar. This was a brilliant decision on their part. Watson has a pleasant tenor, but Taylor's voice is much more colorful and expressive. Though she supplied the high points of previous singles "Trophy Room" and "Giving Up on Love", her vocal performances through Paradise are a revelation: Her phrasing is consistently thoughtful and surprising, full of subtle cues that invest her straightforward lyrics with remarkable depth much in the same way a great actress can draw rich character detail out of a threadbare script. Taylor's best performances-- and not coincidentally, Paradise's two best songs-- take her voice in very different directions. The ballad "You, Earth, or Ash" is so stark and delicate that her voice often seems naked, barely accompanied by the minimal plucking of Watson's guitar. She sounds wounded and fragile, but her tone is very adult and dignified; she gracefully transitions from moments of self-assured beauty to sounding as though she could spontaneously break down into tears. She is more girlish on "Two Cousins", the set's percussion-heavy opener, leaning hard on her upper register and reaching up further still to underscore particularly anguished lines. The song, about a pair of estranged family members, cycles through two choruses-- the first one carried by a trebly, diagonal synthesizer part and the second more focused on her voice, which rings out with heart-breaking clarity as she sings the tune's gutting conclusion: "I look into your eyes/ You don't know who I am."...full text |
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