The Slow Readers Club - Cavalcade (2015)

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The Slow Readers Club - Cavalcade (2015)

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The Slow Reader Club’s darkly enrapturing sound is ambitiously bold and equally as rousing on ‘Cavalcade’. The Slow Readers Club treat us to a cinematic whirlpool of emotionally powerful and rhythmically intense collection of songs on the album. The goal is simple, to both render the listener dumbfounded in swathes of melancholy and to also send them into a sort of furious movement, while they dance any cares away.

Opening with ‘Start Again’ immediately we are struck with prowling synths and a steady bass line highlighted with outlines of intermittent guitar lines. The track grows with intensity as it rolls out, reaching its apex we head into anthem territory in the final bars. Keeping the swelling euphoria going, current single ‘I Saw A Ghost’ raises its head. Moving throughout the record moments of clarity surrender themselves in sweet solemnity (‘Know the Day Will Come’), there’s hope for new beginnings (‘Plant the Seed’), and softer moments of desire and longing (‘Don’t Mind’) bring fragility into the fore-frame.

At the core of The Slow Readers Club is vocalist Aaron Starkie’s adept songwriting, whether he’s musing about depression, heartbreak or infatuation, the songs always carry deep meaning. And for me, that’s the highly prized key to the puzzle. To be able to feel every emotion as strongly as the performer who is delivering those words is rare, and for song after song to achieve this is a feat in itself. The Slow Readers Club convey melancholy and emotional complexity in a rich and enveloping way, that it’s hard to differentiate from that world, so in the process it becomes yours.

The album’s strength is that it is predominately as accessible as pop but still has its feet firmly gripped in the world of indie and alternative, a trait weaved by The Slow Readers Club not dissimilarly to The Killers. I don’t see why we can’t be looking at the same trajectory for The Slow Readers Club, with material of this quality and scale. If ‘Cavalcade’ has anything to do with it, then we could well be looking at a band that will be conquering much larger stages in the future.

~ bittersweetsymphonies.co.uk