‘Like a mini-drama of uncomfortable truths’: Review of Calboa’s debut single ‘Loose Lips’
‘OFF THE BLOCKS IN SENSATIONAL STYLE’: Hull band Calboa
The Crow’s Nest, a music column by Russ Litten
Review of Calboa’s debut single, Loose Lips
Regular readers of this column will remember me breaking bread with Calboa on the eve of their gig in Liverpool with The Libertines. Since that glorious night, the band have recorded their debut single Loose Lips and are celebrating its release with a gig at The Adelphi on Friday, March 17th.
And what a debut single it is. Loose Lips is so self-assured and accomplished it could saunter into your local bank, put its Converses up on the desk and demand a million-pound overdraft. Calboa’s cinematic sound, which I last heard hinted at in a concrete and tin garage off Hessle Road, is captured here in full and glorious blooming technicolour.
They sound like a dusty band of heart-throb renegades playing in a Tarantino roadside bar. It has echoes of The Doors and London Calling-era Clash, that period where they lost some of the tightly-wound punk rock angst, loosened up and let the groove take over. It also reminds me of Space. The band from Liverpool, I mean, not the ever expanding universe. It’s got that same innate sense of melody and that classic, timeless Bacharach feel, but with most of the rough corners left agreeably rough. Or maybe it’s just Callum’s hat.
What Calboa share with all of these artists is a superb sense of dynamics and dramatics. In three and a half copy-book pop minutes, Loose Lips tells a mini-drama of uncomfortable truths and spiky, nerve-shredding paranoia against a taut and tense backdrop of snaking bass, gunslinger guitar and a massively impassioned vocal performance by singer/songwriter Callum. ‘Why are you screaming again’? he asks, before launching back into a chorus that one listen in is already lodging inside your skull like a sinister, charismatic squatter.
Calboa have got the lot, really. The swagger of a street gang, a darkly edgy vibe and the kind of soaring pop sensibility that earmarks a band for massive crossover appeal.
Go and see them at The Adelphi on March 17th. They’ll be ably supported by the force of teenage nature that is Ketamine Kow, themselves fresh from London clutching a freshly-inked record deal. More of that another time. It’s going to be a fantastic night. There’s some great music coming out of our city at the moment. With Loose Lips, Calboa have got off the blocks in sensational style. Watch them fly.
You can find Calboa’s music links here.