There's a lot of back-story to the story of East Village. It's the kind of back-story that has granted a near-mythic status to the British act. Coming up (and famously breaking up on stage) in the peak years of what we conveniently label the C86 era, East Village merged an admirably backwards-looking set of inspirations with a DIY attitude wholly of the Eighties. The band recorded EP's and an album (posthumously released on Heavenly), but it's the group's singles that remain the charming remnants of an impossibly perfect age for U.K. indie. Released this Friday on the fab Slumberland Records, Hotrod Hotel provides proof of just how great East Village were, and how criminally-underappreciated they remain. For now.
"Her Father's Son" is languid and thoughtful, but other numbers here, like the god-like "Strawberry Window", reveal material that's every bit as good as anything from the late Eighties scene in the United Kingdom. "Break Your Neck" recalls early Primal Scream somewhat, while "Back Between Places" chimes gloriously. Sure, there's a hint of late Felt about this, but East Village seemed more interested in writing pop music, even if it was pop as defined by those who read NME and Melody Maker religiously. Smart, but not clever for clever's sake, this stuff is all uniformly excellent. And the tunes of East Village, unlike those of some peers from those years, have been relatively hard to find, so they retain the whiff of freshness about them. In that sense, something like "Cubans in the Bluefields" feels utterly new, even if you think you heard it on a compilation at some point ages ago. Souvenirs of the best era of British indie as far as I'm concerned, every number on Hotrod Hotel feels like a little masterpiece.
Hotrod Hotel is out on Slumberland Records on Friday.