Help She Can’t Swim – The Death of Nightlife
(Fantastic Plastic)

Help She Can’t Swim’s debut album ‘Fashionista Super Dance Troupe’ knocked my block off when a friend who clearly knows my tastes well submitted it for my approval during the final days of 2004.

It was like a perfect band, fallen to earth like manna from heaven: a buncha cynical south coast teenagers with a homegrown mess of screamo punk, Bis/Le Tigre styled DIY dancefloor militancy and squalling Sonic Youth guitars, nailed together with perfecto, super-loud HULK SMASH production. Ten songs in 25 minutes or thereabouts, and every one a knockout. Fuckin’ A! Up there with ‘Mclusky Do Dallas’, Billy Childish’s recent output and very little else as some of the best punk rock made on British soil in recent years. Lyrical content was something else again, but we’ll get on to that later.

So yeah, you know the story, I liked it basically. We tried to go and see them play at some trendy club night in Nottingham, but their van broke down so they didn’t make it and we stayed up all night indulging in all kinda craziness and had to grab the first morning train home and get to work on time the next day. Yes you probably know that story by now too, let’s get to the point.

So it’s the middle of 2007, and here’s their second album. I just went to the shops and bought it. Let's go!

‘Consumer Guide’ review:

It’s pretty damn good! Not quite as good as the first album, but second albums never are, it’s the law or something. If you’re wavering over record purchases sometime this month though, and you don’t want to buy old stuff, you should go buy this one! Go straight to the counter and ask for it! It’s a blast!

‘Music’ review:

More of the same by and large, no drastic changes to report. Lead guitarist Tom Baker has left the band at some point, taking his Sonic Youth shredding with him (yes, I know, it’s a common name – nice mental image tho, no?). The resulting slack has been taken up by Leesey’s keyboards, cheapo casio tones now holding down the melodies and hooks of most of the songs whilst the remaining guitar thrashes away in riff/rhythm mode. The rhythm section are tight and punchy like an elastic band about to snap, though perhaps a bit too reliant on the over-familiar “punk-disco” beat. The drummer (Lewis Baker is his name - HELLO!) likes to go fast, and gets through the slower sections by pretending he's beating a cow to death on his snare drum. The sound here is even bigger, clearer and smashier than on the first record, obviously pretty professionally done, guitars compressed and bordering on slick just enough to give lo-fi warriors like me pause for thought; seems to be a common trait amongst decent contemporary punk bands with something to say – witness the Thermals last one for text-book example. Not a problem though when the band’s energy is still captured this well. I finally caught Help She Can’t Swim live a couple of months back, and they were GREAT, although predictably a lot more shambolic than on record. Basically ‘Death of Nightlife’ sounds like the live band kitted out in American football armour, charging in for a touch-down…. and they make it! Exciting stuff and no mistake.

‘Actual’ review:

(It’s a bit of an essay, so hold on.)

Help She Can’t Swim seem like an inherently neurotic band from the ‘waving not drowning’ name on downwards. The first album found them split between two lyrical modes: firstly, vitriolic (self?)hatred spat out Billy Liar machine gun style against the atrocities of nightclubs, music scenes, social situations in general. Secondly, an aching desire to shut out the world and get wasted in idyllic surroundings with the one you love. Yes! I approve! HSCS know the score: take no prisoners in nailing your easy-won cynicism to 90% of the confusion/alienation/distraction comprising the modern world, but learn to recognise the bits that matter, hold on to them, stay wide-eyed, keep the feeling alive.

Basic point perhaps, but one rarely expressed in such naked and genuine terms by a loud, flailing rock band. There’s a tone of hysteria running through all of their music, a certain violence in the dichotomy they’re putting across, but hell, this approach to life doesn’t seem neurotic to me, it seems NECESSARY.

Now, time for some history: poetry written by teenagers (and to a lesser extent, ANYONE, but let’s stick to the matter in hand) is bad medicine – this we know. It’s a shot in the dark at honest expression, sure, but a cripplingly self-conscious one, point and content always transformed and lost by the author’s self-regard and concern for an imagined audience, hir reliance on the easy dodge of abstraction, hir lack of the courage needed for full disclosure combined with some sick need to court authenticity by playing at being ‘confessional’, long after anything ‘real’ has left the building. Teenage poetry’s train-wreck meeting between pure self-expression and total fabrication is an aesthetic nightmare, so much so it makes me fucking queasy. It’s bullshit man, that’s why nobody reads it. But god only knows, they keep on writing it.

Now one of the greatest gifts rock n’ roll has bestowed on the world is the entirely magical, intangible ability of hammered guitar chords, martial drums and easy melody – the armour of racket, the immediacy of sound, strength in numbers – to TOTALLY bypass this depressing status quo, to give the stuck up, suburban kids of the world the keys to free, genuine expression from the straight-up heart rather than baffled, self-serving brain, enabling the possibility of direct communication / shared emotional response; rock n’ roll can take some mewling diary entry and turn it into something akin to being drop-kicked by William Blake for six seconds, almost entirely without effort or artifice. And the tunes are good too.

It’s these kinds of revelatory moments that I increasingly consider the highest achievement of what I look for in music, whether I find it in The Troggs or The Beach Boys, in Bikini Kill or The Modern Lovers, or all grown up and articulate in Comet Gain and The Replacements. Anyone can act smart and write a song about robots or William Burroughs, can play a riff and start a metal band, sing a ballad and start a folk band, spout some shit and honk on a horn and start a free jazz/poetry band, and that’s all fine and passes the time (that’s the sort of junk I do for one thing), but in the end they’ll get less respect from me than those people who have the courage to really put themselves on the line in the course of using pop music as a means to genuine self-expression; the romanticising and solidifying in no-bullshit terms of doubts and disasters, wishes and dreams.

Whilst they’re not always entirely successful at it (this too is part of the deal when you put yourself on show), Help She Can’t Swim are one of THOSE bands, and they give it their best fucking shot. That’s why I like them so much! Disappointingly though, Help She Can’t Swim aren’t actual teenagers. In fact they’re probably about the same age as me I’d imagine, maybe a year or two younger (as a side-note, I’ve always dreaded the day that I really get into a band who are significantly younger than me… I suspect that day is getting pretty close). But there’s no sign of them retreating behind the curtain of musical maturity or pretending they’re resigned to adulthood or whatever, so let’s go with the teenage thing.

As the title suggests, ‘The Death of Nightlife’ still cycles through plenty of HSCS’s trademark nightclub nightmares, skirting self-parody on celebrity culture hate-rant “All The Stars" ("you're less exciting than my ringtone / how can this life be making you happy?”). The previous album’s corresponding fun-with-my-lover songs seem to have been kicked out though, and I detect some hefty 'relationship worries' at work here instead, making ‘..Nightlife’ an even more anguished prospect. The band do step out of their (dis)comfort zone though on a couple of oddball lyrical experiments in the centre of the album, notably on the Secret Garden-inspired childhood fantasia ‘Midnight Garden’ (did you ever read that book at school? Hated it at the time, but in retrospect I'd imagine it's probably pretty awesome). Leesey's verses, with slower, faintly psychedelic keyboard backing, are the highlight of this song, but otherwise it's a bit muddled. Then there's the roll-call of simple, everyday pleasures on ‘Boxes of Delights’, which ends up recalling one of those slightly smug and disingenuous “hey, we can have fun too!” tracks off a Le Tigre album. Unfortunately, both of these songs are let down primarily by the failure of the music to adjust to the more upbeat lyrical concerns, remaining as violent and frenetic as ever for no apparent reason.

Low points aside, we’re left with about eight or nine songs of the gloriously familiar: the shrieking, the neuroses, the alienation, loner battle-cries and gallows humour, and man, these songs are fucking great. I very much doubt Help She Can't Swim would classify their music as "rock n' roll"; if pushed, they'd probably say that they're "punk rock" or "kinda indie-electro-pop" or "just, y'know, MUSIC" or something. But "rock n' roll" will do me nicely on my universal teenage freedom trip. The words are printed in the CD booklet, and I reckon at least two thirds of them might even be good enough to hit home WITHOUT the rock n’ roll: simple, guileless, furious, great. But it’s the rock n’ roll that allows them space to exist, and don’t you forget it.

I saw lightning bolts covering her eyes
I saw fingers touching her like knives
It's easy not to care about her
But it's hard to forget about her

- 'Dragged Under A Wave'

You wanna take yr clothes off?
You wanna liberate me?
you say you don't believe in love
while you fuck up her sanity
It's hard to breathe when you're always wearing a mask!

- 'I Think The Record's Stopped'

You thought it was wine, but you're drinking lead
and it weighs you down
and it makes you sick

so yr going to shows on yr own
to see some band you don't know
but nothing's exciting
everything's boring
don't see the reasons to be applauding

- 'Just Be Social'

while you were staring at my waistline
I was lost with cats in my head

- 'All The Stars'

Right, that’s about 1500 words from me, and a few from them. I feel this is gonna be one of those reviews I'm going to regret, but in the spirit of the band, let's go with it. Any questions?

Links >
------------------------
Help She Can't Swim info

The band's Myspace, with some songs to listen to.

And check it out, they've made some videos too:

Hospital Drama (real slick one for the new single with the band dressed as zombies, but it's a bit boring.)

I Don't Need You (Great lo-fi video for a song off the first album. Look - somebody's cool indie bedroom! Bass player in the tool shed! Crappy suburban living room! Genius! )