Peace have built our expectation high for their debut album ‘In Love’, with two brilliant singles, ‘Follow Baby’ and ‘Wraith’, and their lauded EP ‘Delicious’ having already provided a taste of the talent they have to offer. The album delivers everything Peace have promised: joyous, cathartic pop-rock and tunes that will stay with you long after the last track is played.
The album opens with track ‘Higher Than The Sun’, a tune strikingly reminiscent to the more recent work of stylistic chameleons The Horrors, as they employ similar ambient rock sounds, and the same drawn out guitar riffs. A dazzling track. The high standard continues as the album leads into ‘Follow Baby’, a track epitomizing the Peace sound and providing excellent, memorable riffs. This is closely followed by ‘Lovesick’, a song which could be seen to have hints of cheesiness, the lyrics “I wanna get lovesick with you” making up the main body of the track. However, the energizing fervour it provides is in line with the cathartic qualities of the album, and it may quickly become a popular favourite.
After the initial high quality of the first three tracks, the album perhaps loses its way slightly. ‘Waste of Paint’ seems like the sub-standard efforts of an unsuccessful ’90s Britpop band, while ‘Delicious’ is a song which starts off so promisingly with its seemingly funk-driven percussive sounds, but descends into an uninspiring and bland main riff. These criticisms, however, are only natural for a debut album and the majority of the album fully delivers.
Peace are a band with an almost universal appeal, not pandering to any specific musical crowds and producing music with undeniably catchy rhythms and lyrics. Perhaps not as experimental as some of the other bands to come out of Birmingham recently, such as Swim Deep and the ever-elusive Troumaca, but perhaps one which is destined to be more successful, as they are fully aware of what their audience wants. There are certainly enough decent tracks on here to give the Peace boys the recognition they deserve, and the quality of the music they produce shows that they have a promising future.
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