Silver-plated gold. That's what this is. It's champagne laced with sparkling Cava, diamonds clustered with cubic zirconia, a luxury cruise with a special, bonus stop-off at Benidorm. It's a gilded lily: still pretty damn lovely on the surface, but utterly perfect underneath.
Straw embellish. Straw don't need to embellish. And yet they do, from the second that singer Mattie Bennett takes the stage in frankly absurd ski-goggles - a stage, it should be noted, that also comes unnecessarily adorned, the backlit signs behind each Strawster superfluously (if cleverly) denoting which instrument they play. Fair enough, but it was always bound to have one inevitable, and regrettable, effect...
He's stood on the right-hand side of the room and he's a c***. Dammit, everyone else here's got the right attitude, leaping and dancing and singing and smiling and swooning and caring, but this guy? This guy's just a c***, sipping his pint, sneering at the stage, muttering 'corporate indie' and, finally, thankfully, f***ing off to happily rot under whichever stone he crawled out from. Good Riddance.
'Corporate indie'? Didn't they used to say that about Straw's label-mates Catatonia? About the Manics? About Blur? About Oasis? The problem is, this c***'s got half a point, and it's all Straw's fault. Too many fireworks dazzle, too much flavour overpowers and too much Straw burns. And yet, and yet...
F*** me, this band glow. 'Wake Up (Miss Venezuela)' comes first, comes with a beat big enough for your mamma, all her bridge friends and the postman she's started shagging on the side. Comes with Eighties-style electro blips like Buck Rogers on an E and a floppily wired tune that snakes its crazy panic right down into the pit of your stomach, doubling you over to dance new holes in your shoes. Ands then it gets better, slightly less like Space, slightly more like the Longpigs with the blissfully lovely last single, 'Moving To California', Duck's subtly evocative electronics sweetening Roger (new Graham Coxon) Power's spikily lascivious guitars. And then it gets better still with 'Kill Your Boyfriend', an anything-but-light four-minute heartbreak, an apology for all the mediocrity music's foisted upon us in the name of sensitivity. So beautiful it aches. See, once you've burned inside to these slowies, the bubbling genius of Straw's faster songs is far easier to adore, far harder to peg as.. ugh, 'corporate indie'.
As if.
So 'The Aeroplane Song' and 'Dracula Has Risen From The Grave' are among the greatest bouncy, slinky party tunes you've ever heard, 'Weird Superman' with its lashing chords and deliriously frenzied chorus are the absolute last word in euphoria. OK, sure, maybe music's had its day and we best surrender our ears to the candle-manufacturing industry for interestingly scented wax right now. On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe this matters. Maybe, when Mattie fudges that final leap from the drum-riser, when drummer Andy Nixon fluffs lobbing his sticks into the crowd, when their adorably misguided attempts to gild that lily just seem laughable, maybe someone should just tell 'em: Must Try Softer. Then you can be the greatest band in the world. You're halfway there. Keep going, keep going.

Robin Bresnark

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