Tell Me If You Like To is the much anticipated debut from the Manchester four piece, Spring King. The band have been making waves over the years, touring with the likes of Wolf Alice, Slaves and Courtney Barnett, collecting a huge following as they move from venue to venue. Tarek Musa, Peter Darlington, James Green and Andrew Morton are the guys that impressively were the first unsigned band to have their music played on Beats 1.
From the opener you can sense that the album wrestles with themes such as fear and paranoia throughout, with melancholy lyrics like: “the night comes alive, every time, you’re in my neighbourhood” taken from ‘Demons’. This said, their raw energy strays each song away from being downtrodden and instead carries hit after hit into pop territory.
Tell Me If You Like To is an album for the summer; picture drinking a cold, fruity cider whilst listening to 'Rectifier’ echoing through the festival tents. Effortlessly cool, ‘City’ and bonus track ‘Mumma’ is consumed by rumbling, feedback ridden guitars and coarse vocals before breaking out into another catchy chorus. Spring King’s sound moves at 100mph with addictive guitar rhythms and repetitive drum beats. The epic ‘Who Are You?’ was one of the first singles from the band, which builds from the drums, intertwining fuzzy guitar riffs, before falling into a piercing horn section. A notion that is sure to get you grooving. Yet on tracks like ‘It’s So Dark’ and ‘Heaven’ lyrics falter, at times feels rushed and unfortunately don’t make a good enough stance in comparison to the others on the album.
Lead singer Tarek Musa’s voice carries a sense of innocence and almost sounds sweet in tracks like ‘The Summer’. In ‘Take Me Away’ he wails, singing about sour themes: “Mother why it you’re crying is / Is it from the television?” This paired with plenty of crashing cymbals, and percussion, adds the right amount of zing, creating an atmospheric feeling that falls just past the point of being cautious. The whole album is upbeat and could brighten the mood of even the more stubborn, or in other words, take a tangerine, smash it with something heavy and feed the pulp to a moody child. That is what Tell Me If You Like To sounds like, one tangy gulp at a time (well sort of).
The best way to truly appreciate the power of the guitar and to blitz that melancholy undertone is to listen to this album how it was intended to be heard; full blast, outside on a sunny day with a few pals nearby. Tell Me If You Like To is a generous effort for a debut, and has a tracklist that is bold enough to bring Spring King into the forefront and market them as one of the UK’s exciting new guitar bands.
Tell Me If You Like To is available via Amazon & iTunes.
