English Teacher review, This Could Be Texas: A crafty and ambitious debut album that demands respect
With a name like English Teacher, a bit of intellectual posturing is to be expected. The Leeds-formed band (singer Lily Fontaine, guitarist Lewis Whiting, drummer Douglas Frost, and bassist Nicholas Eden) have never shirked the suggestion themselves – there aren’t many bands who’d name their debut EP after an obscure pun on a rare testicular defect. Two years after Polyawkward, English Teacher have put out their first full-length album, the 13-song LP This Could Be Texas. It’s an album that’s crafty and allusive in its lyricism; sonically, it’s just as ambitious.
Jangly guitars undergird album opener “Albatross”, a bright and catchy indie rock number that gives way to the rigidly metered guitar riffs of “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab”, an amusing and punchy single built around a knowingly contrived metaphor. “I am the world’s biggest paving slab/ So watch your f***ing feet,” sings Fontaine on the song, which also namechecks a somewhat random smattering of proper nouns from Up North: the actor John Simm; the BNP terrorist arrested on Talbot Street; Charlotte Brontë.
English Teacher are often characterised as “post-punk” – a pigeonhole that is only half accurate. (Speaking to The Independent a couple of years ago, the band said they prefer “silly noisy guitar music” as a label.) But “post-punk” feels apt at points – particularly when they twin sharp, rhythmic guitars with Fontaine’s drolly inflected sprechgesang, as they do on the breathless and slippery “I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying”. Fontaine speak-sings, too, through verses of the mercurial “Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space”, which evokes – not for the first time on the record – the raw and potent sounds of Scottish art-rock group Life Without Buildings.
There are moments when the sheer range of styles and musical ideas is a little disorienting. Some of the most impressive tracks are also the most modest, such as the frantic, jittery-drummed standout “Nearly Daffodils”. “Broken Biscuits”, meanwhile, commands your attention with syncopated rhythms and irregular time signatures.
By the time the final track rolls around – the lush, rousing “Albert Road” – This Could Be Texas has its hooks in you. “I don’t hear the blues any more,” Fontaine sings. “I’ve got a war of roses for a head/ I am the stem and I am the thorn.” It’s neatly evocative imagery – opting, as the band frequently do, for vagueness and suggestion over any hard lyrical certainties.
Even if you don’t love This Could Be Texas, it’s a hard album not to respect. English Teacher have well and truly arrived: the class had better pay attention.
