There’s something deliciously odd about “Trixies”. On one hand, it is a brand new Squeeze album. On the other, its roots go all the way back to 1974, to a cassette of demos written by teenage Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook at the very start of their partnership. Built around a fictional nightclub and shaped by big ideas, bigger ambition and a certain underworld storytelling flair, these songs have waited half a century to be fully realised. The remarkable thing is that they don’t sound like relics. They sound alive.
From the start, the record has those late-night jazz bar vibes all over it. “What More Can I Say” opens proceedings in a way that feels laid back, stylish and immediately immersive. It doesn’t shout for attention, because Squeeze never need to. They just slip into gear and make this sort of thing seem effortless. “You Get The Feeling” follows and deepens the mood, a perfect title really, because by that point you absolutely do get the feeling that you’ve stepped into a very particular world.
That world is a little seedy, a little down at heel and often gloriously lugubrious. “The Place We Call Mars” feels like one of those beautifully observed little crime-scene vignettes, while “Hell On Earth” throws in a hard rock riff that only strengthens the sense that anything might happen here. One of the joys of “Trixies” is that it never settles into one texture for too long. Just when you think you’ve got its measure, it shifts the lights and changes the scene.
“The Dancer” has those 70s glam rock vibes, all strut and movement, with a hook that won’t let go, and “Good Riddance” carries some of the same theatrical edge, but with the synth sound more obviously to the fore. In fact, throughout the record the keyboards add a faintly unsettling feel, and there’s a definite Sparks edge in places, that same sense of clever pop music made just crooked enough to keep you on edge. When the line about “her fists were clenched down by her side” lands, it tells you plenty about the album’s atmosphere. This is not just retro dressing-up. There is tension here.
That tension keeps building on “Don’t Go Out In The Dark”, another title that sounds like a warning and plays like one too, before “Why Don’t You” arrives with a sort of riotous come-hither swagger. Squeeze have always been brilliant at sketching characters and scenes in a few strokes, and that quality is all over this record. The songs don’t just tell stories, they place you in them.
“Anything But Me” is where the whole album starts to feel even more soundtrack-like, and that sense only deepens with “It’s Over”. “The rain is still falling, it’s three in the morning” is one of those lines that seems to sum up the whole record: world weary, bruised, a little romantic and very, very Squeeze. Nowhere does “Trixies” sound more tired in the most elegant possible way than here. It’s music for the point in the night where everything starts to feel both sharper and more blurred at the same time.
Then “The Jaguars” changes the pace again. Ready for a two-step? This has got you sorted. Even when the album leans into its shadowy storytelling, it never loses sight of rhythm and movement. That matters, because the club at the centre of this record has to feel lived in, and Squeeze make sure it does.
By the time “Trixies (Part One)” and “Trixies (Part Two)” arrive, the concept is complete. These songs feel like the doors swinging fully open on the place the album has been hinting at all along. “There’s a door behind the stage that will take you to the cellar” is exactly the kind of detail that makes the whole thing vivid. Honestly, it sounds like the sort of room that would scare the shit out of me, and the brass only adds to the speakeasy feel, as though somewhere below all this lurks an even stranger corner of the night.
What lifts “Trixies” above being merely a neat anniversary exercise is the sheer quality of the writing and the ease of the execution. Difford and Tilbrook were clearly already thinking big when they first came up with these songs, but fifty years on they finally have the means to make that youthful vision land exactly as intended. The result is stylish, richly textured and full of character. It feels like a record that begins when most nights are winding down.
RATING: 8.5/10
