The Herald [En]: Review of "Super De Luxe" album
Attic Lights, Super De Luxe (Elefant)
When you are on a hip Spanish indie label, rather than the less-than-the-badge-it-once-was that Island Records has become in the 21st century, it would not do to be aiming for pop mega-stardom.
So Scotland's Attic Lights, who were much lauded when their debut album Friday Night Lights came out back in 2008 on the label that previously brought us Bob Marley, carefully drop all the right names as influences, with Alex Chilton's Big Star and Scotland's own Teenage Fanclub – whose drummer Francis Macdonald co-produces – almost too predictably in the mix.
Attic Lights should have altogether more commercial aspirations. Their antecedents include Abba and such pop song-writing partnerships as Martin and Coulter and Stock, Aitken and Waterman. At least one instrumental hook here is pretty much a straight lift from the catalogue of The Beatles, and they get away with it. Macdonald and John McLaughlin have done a fine job on the production, with rich arrangements of guitars and keyboards and beautifully recorded vocals. The icing on the cake is the clever lyricism on tracks such as Future Bound and Hit and Miss that finds new ways of expressing those age-old boy/girl situations. In a better world this would be a mega-selling disc.