TBS Faves Album Here at Last!

• Posted: Tue 11 Jan 2011
• By: Kev

We've been banging on to you about The Chapman Family for ages now here at The Beat Surrender (well they have been around since 2006), they came and played a great gig for us before Christmas in Leeds...and now they have released details of their soon to be released and much anticipated debut album.

7th March will see the band release Burn Your Town through PIAS / Electric Toaster and the album will be proceeded by the single Anxiety the week before on the 28th February.

Recorded with Future of the Left producer Richard Jackson (“We loved that huge bass and drums sound”), it’s one that expands The Chapman Family’s range hugely. Says Kinglsey, “We could have done ten tracks of angry noisy smashy guitars, but that’s a bit one dimensional. We’ve tried to do an album in cinemascope, Avatar, 3D style. It’s like an alternative version of Pet Sounds.”

A deliberate throwback to the way albums used to work, “Burn Your Town”, is meant to be listened to as one piece. “We wanted to make a slightly nostalgic album like those bands we used loved when we first started did – Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, The Strokes,” says Kingsley, “It’s not like providing a couple of songs for your iPod. We wanted to do old-school things to make it a more rounded piece.”

While fans of punk brutality won't be disappointed by recent single “All Fall”, right from the opener “A Certain Degree” with it's darkly close harmonies, and ambient dread, this album will surprise a lot of people. It sees the band emerging from the shadow of Joy Division into the widescreen netherworld of The Cure - a place in which they can nimbly shift between black-witted love songs like “Sound of the Radio” to the apocalyptic gloom of “1000 Lies” or “A Million Dollars” with its "three minute noise section, food processors on amps, drills on guitars...all creating a total horror noise to fit in with a song about murdering children in World War 2 Britain."

There's a new brilliantly unhinged version of their sensational early single “Kids”, which somehow speeds up and intensifies the already speedy and intense original; it's central 'solo' now sounds like a trepanning gone wrong. Plus, in “Anxiety” the album has an iron-clad hit : a spiralling, soaring pop song of heart bursting defiance which sneers "your best isn't good enough," but still somehow manages to be electrically uplifting.

As well as the above releases the band have also been invited to support The Joy Formidable on their forthcoming tour which takes in the following dates:

FEBRUARY w/ The Joy Formidable

01 - Old Fire Station, Bournemouth
02 - Thekla, Bristol
03 - Academy 2, Birmingham
04 - Club Academy, Manchester
06 - King Tuts, Glasgow
07 - Electric Circus, Edinburgh
08 - Academy 2, Newcastle
09 - Garage, London w/ Young Knives
11 - Plug, Sheffield
12 - St. Pauls, Cambridge
13 - Academy 2, Leicester