The Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club – Love On An Oil Rig

Any appearance of nautical schtick in British indie rock is a thing of joy, and to be celebrated, slotting seamlessly as it does into the lineage of eccentricity in our pop music. And lo, as if British Sea Power couldn’t make the maritime allegiance any more apparent, along come past tourmates The Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club to outdo them with their second album Love On An Oil Rig, hosting a thoroughly delinquent on-deck party involving songs of dumb parrots and nautical male inadequacy, prodigious volumes of rum, cigars and swashbuckling libido.

The connection doesn’t end with the appreciation for all things seaward either. At their best – the forty-seven second long car (or should that be boat?) crash of the title track, the sinister ‘Women And Children’ with its lunatic falsetto chant of “knives and swimming pools and that!” – TVEGC hark back to the most wild and feral moments of ‘Sea Power’s debut, the realms the latter sadly left behind in search of the epic, sweeping territory they’re currently exploring. If anything they manage to pull off the difficult feat of winning in the utter derangement stakes; ‘God Save Us From Being So Damn Primitive’, aside from being the most fantastically named song of the year, pits Adam Taylor’s best demonic Elvis impression and a Joey Santiago-inspired single note guitar wail against a slow, swampy bass and drum churn to chilling effect.

There’s a demented but defiantly tongue-in-cheek sense of sleaze that permeates Love On An Oil Rig, even down to its suggestive title, soaking even the most downbeat moments in barely resolved, simmering tension. When that pent-up frustration is partially released it is tightly reined in yet barely under control, a surprisingly effective skirmish serving to emphasise the dissonant thrusts in ‘The Venereal Game’ and lay waste to all before it when the defences are knocked down entirely towards the end of ‘Periscope Envy’.

Yet for all its manic charm, the most memorable moments are those few times when saccharine female harmonies soften the blow of Taylor’s gravelly yelps to create something unexpectedly poignant amidst the storm; when upcoming single ‘Watching The Burglars’ suddenly bursts skyward from its low-slung garage clatter, or when the rabid ‘Bored In Belgium’ drops to a silence for the briefest of moments during the coda before all three singers battle for supremacy in a fevered chant, “Bangin’ and bangin’ and bangin’ and bangin’ on!”

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