Send "The Duke Spirit " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The Duke Spirit are a band you want to root for, blessed as they are with an alluring frontwowan (Liela Moss) and good taste (drawing on everything from 1980s UK indie to northern soul to murder ballads), but also a willingness to burnish those outsider sources with a considerable sass and swagger to bring the masses on-side. And yet, the masses have been mostly resistant to their charms-- the London group first surfaced in 2005 in the shadow of the similarly seedy but more widely celebrated Kills, while the ensuing years have seen upstart acts like the Joy Formidable emerging with more bombastic, attention-grabbing takes on shared noise-pop influences.The title of the Duke Spirit's third album would suggest they're tired of being relegated to second-class NME citizenry and ready to show the kids who's boss. But Bruiser-- produced by alt-rock spit-shiner Andrew Scheps-- feels oddly restrained, as the band sounds caught between the duelling desires to hold onto its grit-rock roots and to make its sound more sophisticated. The Duke Spirit have always attempted a tricky balancing act in their music--between the classic and the modern, the dissonant and the accessible, the decadent and the elegant-- but sometimes you wish they'd forsake this mode of controlled tension and give in to more extreme tendencies. Early singles "Love Is an Unfamiliar Name" and "Cuts Across the Land" weren't exactly textbook-definition ragers, but they still possessed a certain thrust, swing, and vigor; by contrast, Bruiser salvos "Cherry Tree" and "Procession" are set to lumbering, mid-tempo backbeats that don't provide the band with much opportunity to catch fire and push the Duke Spirit perilously close to run-of-the-mill mid-2000s modern rock. (The pomped-up power ballad "Northbound" doesn't do them any favors in that regard either, sounding a few years too late for an O.C. prom-scene placement.)...full text |
| Bbc |
| It’s almost a rock’n’roll cliche: the group that took years to write their debut album, and then were horsewhipped back into the studio by labels with eyes fixed to their balance sheets. The result: a rushed and unsatisfying follow-up. Credit, therefore, to London quintet The Duke Spirit – and the labels that have mothered them over the years – for allowing the band some three-and-a-half years between each of their three albums to date. What, then, have the band been up to since issuing their second full-length, Neptune, in early 2008? In rough order: enduring a line-up change, touring incessantly, being cooed over by the late Alexander McQueen and, eventually, recording Bruiser. By the standards of their previous two albums, unpolished garage blues located near 80s bands like The Gun Club or early Bad Seeds, these 12 songs are hi-fi and buffed. This is probably the result of production duties being handed to Andrew Scheps, an American more normally employed as engineer for genuine rock superstars. Rest assured, though, that there’s still feedbacking squall and gothic clang, and The Duke Spirit still sound like The Duke Spirit. This could be taken equally to suggest that they don’t seem to be stretching themselves hugely on here. Several numbers (such as Procession, and the radio rock-ish Running Fire) are surface-level successful, in that their riffs have a rich timbre and pleasing arrangement, and Liela Moss belts out a catchy lyrical refrain until each song finishes and you can’t recall much about it. This may be one reason why they’ve never accrued a breakout hit, or song recognisable beyond their fanbase....full text |
| Nme |
| It’s hard to understand why this lot never really took off. Their rock rollicking on debut ‘Cuts Across The Land’ was a thing of arresting sexiness – see the ever-fresh ‘Love Is An Unfamiliar Name’. Yet despite an equally winning second album, ‘Neptune’, they just… fell off the radar. It’s with some bafflement we can report that their third sees them still being really good. The jagged-riffed, swaggering ‘Procession’ is as darkly pouty as ever, the sprawling psych of ‘Bodies’ admirably ambitious, the sultry, charming ‘Don’t Wait’ irresistible. Maybe they’re just too solid, too classic, too… lacking in danger, but ‘Bruiser’ proves they’re still putting up a hell of a fight....full text |
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