The Beat Surrender

I really like The Pigeon Detectives and not just because they come from Leeds (although that does help of course), I just think there is a real honesty about their music which you don’t get with some bands.

Add to that the fact that they are a brilliant live band who really do own the stage when they play, in Matt Beaumont they have a front man who really works with the crowd to get things going, no speaker stand is too high for him to climb and no amount of swings on his microphone will ever stop him wanting another one!

But despite all these plus points, I’m starting to feel a little bit sorry for them, not just because they had so much success with the debut album and now have to follow it up, but also because they seem to have set their sound so hard in stone that you can’t see them ever being able to change it without upsetting the core of their audience.

Maybe in 30 or 40 years we’ll look back and talk about how The Pigeons controversially changed their sound in the same way as Bob Dylan when he first plugged in that electric guitar, but somehow I don’t think so.

They’ve returned within a year with this their second album Emergency. That in itself could be taken as a good or bad thing depending on your view, it’s good that they haven’t allowed themselves to disappear for too long and be forgotten about, but maybe it has been rushed a little, if they’d given more time to it they could possibly have looked at throwing in more hints at a future sound potentially.

The only track on here that is a complete change away from their established punk-pop shout along song formula is the brilliantly simple yet amazingly effective Nothing To Do With You. It’s an acoustic track (shock horror) and is all the better for it. The vocals are good and with the song stripped back like this it proves how well Matt can sing, letting the emotions in the lyrics come through far more than normal.

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