Bridlington post/punks Feral Family release their debut album ‘Without Motion’ this month. An album about growing-up and getting-by in a seaside town strewn with complex characters and tangled relationships.
The album opens with `Cairo` a blistering introduction with drum and bass competing for attention while the song narrates the harsh realities of adulthood which isn`t as envisaged. A pretty anthemic nigh on cinematic introduction. Although the pace is retained on `Deep Cuts` it relates the overwhelming agony of a broken heart.
`This Side of Me` refers to the struggle of how past relationships can shape your attitude and behaviour in new ones and your inner battles to prevent this. Another blistering rock out. We have all endured unrequited loves and viewed relationships that you`ve felt have no future and `Its All Us` addresses these predicaments with a fairly captivating rhythmic soundscape allowing a platform for these thoughts.
I read that `Wee Van Bee` tips it`s hat to Lee Van Cleef of “The Good the Bad and the Ugly” spaghetti western fame and imagines him as a drug dealer in the band`s seaside town dealing unspecified pharmaceuticals. A track that does have those haunting harmonic “wah wah wah” cries spliced throughout. The companion piece to the previous number follows with `Spice King` a Dune-inspired imaginary piece that delves into the mind of an incarcerated dealer climbing his cell walls as his empire falls. It`s a fairly dreamy reflective composition.
`Someday` is a fairly sombre, introspective slow burn musing on a failed romance where your partner has successfully moved on, but you can`t seem to. Sadly, today life can be taken over by work, it quickly gets to a point where working to live becomes living to work and `Sold` reflects this narratively and musically as it`s a times tribal beat reflects an unrelenting pace of life.
Social media can be a tool for both good and bad, but the downsides are expressed here in the pounding beating rhythmic `The Mercy` which has a kind of undiluted power abut it. There`s a pulsating fast paced tempo to `Fractured` which addresses a relationship seemingly built on lies and deceit which engenders the inevitable conclusion
The album closes with `Smother` a thoughtful shimmering submission that hints towards thoughts of suicide and the appeal of this destructive action as an answer to overwhelming circumstances. A subject that sadly, I have devastating personal experience of the consequences of such action.
‘Without Motion’ focuses on the difficulties of adolescence without judgement from a position mostly of personal experiences and in amongst the dark they is also light and humour.
If I didn`t know I would not have thought this was Feral Family`s debut album as it shows a delightfully maturity in not only lyrical content but also in sound.
Rating 8.5 / 10
