The View – ‘Exorcism Of Youth’ review: less raucous, but smartly polished indie-rock

18 August, 2023

The View

If Royal Blood’s petulant snipes at the uninterested pop audience of Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Dundee didn’t serve to remind the nation what “rock music” used to be, local heroes The View went one further. Like their indie rock forefathers, and their punk forefathers before them, they let the world know they’d reformed after a five-year hiatus and had a new, sixth album on the way by having a good old-fashioned punch up onstage at a toilet venue in Manchester. “A brotherly bust-up that went too far,” they explained, in time-honoured indie gossip page fashion, and while Twitter (remember that?) clutched its digital pearls in outrage, the sleaze rockers of 2006 hunkered down for a proper old ‘Wasted Little DJs’ style on-record brawl.

Which ‘Exorcism Of Youth’ undoubtedly isn’t. As the title suggests, the Dundee four-piece arrived in producer Youth’s studio in Granada, Spain, ready to shed their formative raucousness and align themselves with the successful, more polished contemporary indie rock of The Lathums, The Snuts and other such bands which humans appear genetically incapable of appreciating while south of the M6. The title track and first single ‘Feels Like’ introduce the album in just such anthemic mode: top down, sunnies out, XFM on, speeding down the nearest Propaganda. With guitars set to sky-dive, drums to Sunset and keyboards to Brightside, it’s life-affirming stuff, even as ‘Feels Like’ suggests that singer Kyle Falconer’s tendency towards inner-city angst has survived well into his thirties. “I’m living a nightmare, not a dream”, he sings, detailing the very public woes of being the town cuckold as if it’s something to scream from the rooftops.

From there, the record could easily slide into the playlist indie furrow: bare-chested heartbreak, choruses to shoulder-lift girlfriends to, mid-afternoon festival slots, bosh. Indeed, The Strokes crackle to ‘The Wonder Of It All’ and ‘Woman Of The Year’ (“I’m done with the drugs ‘cause they wreck my bones…will you still love me when I’m clean?”) is reassuringly compulsive but will only add to speculation that traditional guitar music got caught in an inescapable feedback loop around 2008. Thankfully, ‘Exorcism…’ has ambition up its sleeve. ‘Arctic Sun’ repurposes a Celtic reel for glam punk purposes. ‘Shovel In His Hands’ takes on a dark carnival tone, enticing the listener to dance with the devil to its insidious, morbid rock groove. And by its second half, the album is hoofing modern indie rock conventions overboard by the barrel-load.

‘Allergic To Mornings’ could almost be a Jeff Lynne production, with its idyllic Beatle-y largesse; ‘Neon Lights’ pure synthpunk gutter-crawling. ‘Footprints In The Sand’ ventures into cosmic electro goth, while ‘Tangled’ appears to have taken some serious hallucinogens while listening to Phil Collins’ ‘…But Seriously’. There are by-numbers ‘80s electropop tracks (‘Dixie’) and confetti strewn Coldplay showstoppers (‘Black Mirror’) – and enjoyable ones at that – but what at first resembled a cap-in-hand re-application to the indie rock fraternity ends as minor coup, restructuring its tired constitutions and pointing all manner of ways out of the rut. The View, in their way, still have vision.