Over the course of two albums,
Dom Thomas and his
Whyte Horses collective made a name for themselves as master mixers of vintage sounds derived from swinging French ye-ye, swirling psychedelia, strutting big-city soul, snappy garage rock, and hooky kitchen sink pop. It's a little bit of theft, a little bit of borrowing too, but
Thomas and his merry gang reassemble the pieces in ways that make clear they are adding great dollops of their own vision to the music.
Hard Times does away with any trainspotting and lays their influences on the table with a selection of covers that range from familiar (
Cher's "Bang Bang [My Baby Shot Me Down],"
Todd Rundgren's "I Saw the Light") to classic (
Lou Reed's “Satellite of Love,"
Plastic Bertrand's "Ça Plane Pour Moi"), to quite obscure ("Seabird" by
the Alessi Brothers, "Toycn" by Welsh prog band Brân). Unlike their first two records, where the singers (apart from
La Roux) flew mostly under the radar, they are joined by a more prominent batch of vocalists including
Tracyanne Campbell,
Gruff Rhys,
Badly Drawn Boy, and John Grant. Most often, the choice of singer, song, and sound results in pleasant nostalgia.
Melanie Pain's sweet croon fits the group's smooth backing on "I Saw the Light" and Chrysta Bell belts out a dramatic take on "Bang Bang," while in-house vocalists Lucy Styles and
Natalie McCool do a fine job on a number of songs, most notably a version of Phil Cordell's "Red Lady," a glimmering slice of late-'60s psych pop given the full
Whyte Horses treatment. Sometimes, the pairing of singer and song is close to perfect.
La Roux delivers an aching take on the underrated
Bee Gees song "Mr Natural" as the band make like a classic soul group, while
Tracyanne Campbell exudes seven shades of melancholy on the dreamlike psych pop ballad "Up in My Mind."
Gruff Rhys sings like he has a giant smile plastered across his mug on the rollicking take of "Tocyn" that serves as the album's most energetic track and pushes away some pleasant haze that settles over the rest of it. Therein lies the main problem with the album: it is a little too restrained and reverent to truly be anything more than a nice diversion. Listening to it back to back with one of their own albums, it's hard to see why
Thomas decided he had to make
Hard Times at all when their work already sounds like the "fantasy mixtape" they were aiming for here. It's far from a bad record, but it's a bit of a letdown for anyone who fell in love with the group's first two albums and looked forward to hearing them dig deep into their influences and come up with something special. ~ Tim Sendra