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Following up last year’s critically acclaimed ‘Donkey Stock’ EP, Absentee return with their first long-player, ‘Schmotime’, a glorious, subversive and strangely tender album all based around, well, shagging. Out on ludicrously ‘now’ label, Memphis Industries, home of The Go! Team, Field Music and The Pipettes; Absentee will confuse as many people as they will convert – sounding like a mild mannered pop band fronted by a sex-obsessed grizzly bear. With a world-weariness that would do Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat proud, Absentee take on bad sex, accidental pregnancies, relationship troubles and murder, all backed with guitar lines that sound like the best bits of Rilo Kiley, doo-wop backing vocals and, brilliantly, what sounds like a chorus of pre-school children. And with titles like ‘There’s a Body in a Car Somewhere’ and ‘Something to Bang,’ you can be sure that this won’t be your bog-standard Teenage Fanclub album.
Singer Dan Michaelson’s almost comically deep voice gives the impression of a lung cancer sufferer looking back on his halcyon days as a womanising twenty something, while bassist Laurie Earl’s twee and deliberately naïf backing vocals set off Michaelson’s baritone perfectly. It’s this dynamic that saves the album from sounding like another hackneyed "Oh woe is me, I’m really miserable, but I’ll be really clever like Morrissey and make really cheerful tunes" record (you know who you are, Camera Obscura!) reflecting the album’s struggle between sunny celebrations of youth and dark murmurings about the breakdown of human relationships.
Fittingly for a band that look like they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards, the best line on the best track of the album, “Darling, you’re no oil painting, and I’m no Michelangelo” ('We Should Never Have Children') is as self-deprecating and coursing as the rest of the album gets. Lyrically, this is a gem of a debut record, soaked in the sweat of a hundred incestuous beds (how brilliant is ‘More Trouble’s’ “will you show heart/ and other body parts?” Mike Skinner, take note) and the failures of the protagonist to make or keep meaningful relationships. Musically, it’s all been done before, but the summery power-pop is so hook laden that you’ll forget any easy Bell & Sebastian comparisons before the end of the first track.
If you want tales of modern life that don’t revert to the kind of cod-hoi polloi clichés of the Ordinary Boys and Hard Fi, this is an album that’s been around the block, and would do it all again tomorrow if it could be arsed to get out of bed. Songs that evoke the feeling of Pulp’s ‘Common People,’ a celebration of the mundane, of screwing people for the hell of it (“oh we’re not in love, but there’s comfort and respect in our bed” ‘More Troubles’) and of coming home drunk and horny (“you can’t just come here drunk, insisting on love, like you’ve got a hold on me” ‘You Try Sober’). It’s comfortable, regretful, but not life changing. On the heart-wrenching ‘Hey Tramp,’ Michaelson pleads futilely with an ex to get back with him (“I remember what I had to say to you, Lady, I’ve got time for you now”) Some bands have delusions of world domination. Absentee just seem to want out of here, and, like they say on bomb-proof single in waiting ‘Getaway’, “you told me I could getaway, so here I am.”
Bad points? Well, the relentless cheerfulness of the music can be a little wearying by the end of the album, as can the ever-prevalent spectre of awkward and uncomfortable sexual encounters, and Michaelson’s tendancy to slip into apparently careless misogyny (‘Something to Bang’ is as crass as it sounds) may alienate some, but these are minor points. 'Schmotime' is an excellent debut album that promises big things from as strange a pop band as you’ll hear all year. Trust us, you’ll fall in love. Just don’t let them talk you into sleeping with them.
