Chairlift – 'Something' review
If you’re going to write an album wilfully indebted to the sheeny 80s pop that is the backbone of Magic FM, it’s going to go one of two ways, and the rating that you’ve already read at the top of this review tells you that Chairlift’s second album is no stinker. Quite how it manages to be such a triumph, though, is even more impressive than the record itself. In short, it’s the songs, each one a knock-out melodic punch that overcomes any potential naffness, brilliantly constructed, sung with equal parts longing and sass and then produced to within an inch of Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach-era lawyers.
I Belong In Your Arms is a wonderfully propulsive slip of a song – gone in barely three minutes – with a chorus that leaves you baffled as to how it has never been written before, while Amanaemonesia is a mini-symphony of funk wrapped around another killer hook. Regrettably, after that, the album loses its sharpness (the ambient float of Turning sounds like it’s visiting from a different record entirely), but it’s far from fatal – Something remains one of the catchiest, most fist-clenchingly addictive records you’re likely to hear in 2012.
9/10
