There is always a very specific moment of melancholy on a Sunday afternoon.
The time itself is never precise but the sudden mood shift descends with a swiftness and a keen edge at some time and someplace between about 3 pm and 5 pm. It has nothing to do with alcohol consumption or Saturday night hangovers, very little to do with relationship break ups or difficulties, and nothing whatsoever to do with work stresses and woes.
It is a small, hard, beige and greyish coloured simultaneous memory of where you once were, bound up with the fear of where you may be going.
Your first instinct, being the alternative music fan that you are, is to crank up the stereo as loud as possible and ride the sonic wave until you achieve a renewed sense of equilibrium.
But Sunday afternoons in Britain are not particularly suited to loud outbursts, and so what you need is a something rather subdued in hue but bathed in ever-growing washes of lyrical, layered sound.
Criminal Song, the latest record from Idle Crooks & Englishmen fits the brief rather well indeed.
A quiet start, hesitant perhaps, builds to a gradual crescendo of the sort of electric symphony that a great many of the most alternative bands produced in the latter part of the 1980s through to the early 1990s. There are moments when the guitars blend to release these glorious harmonic chimes, with the steady crunch of bass and drum that grumbles beneath.
Idle Crooks & Englishmen – a tight four-piece that consists of singer and guitarist Tom Hurn, guitarist Joe Ottaway, bassist Josh Sayers, and drummer Adam Hall – have been likened to Royal Blood, Smashing Pumpkins, and Queens of the Stone Age, and it’s easy to see why. It’s that lush quality, the layering of sounds, a rock underpinning but a longing overtone that certainly evokes a track like Tonight, Tonight for example.
Criminal Song drops just before a tour of the UK, which arrives at the Hope & Ruin on October 26th. A masterful single, and a recommendation from Plugged In Brighton to catch them live at the end of next month.
FFO: Royal Blood, Smashing Pumpkins, Queens of the Stone Age.
Idle Crooks & Englishmen is on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Idlecrooks
Criminal Song is available to listen to on Spotify
Plugged In Brighton 