CD CHOICE: CHIEF Modern RitualsDomino Records ****
You wake up one morning and you want to hear the big music – glory-bound guitars, pristine production, a vocalist not afraid to sing from the rooftops – but you just can’t stomach the messiah-complex histrionics of Richard Ashcroft. Fear not, California rockers Chief will tick all the rights boxes without ticking you off.
This Santa Monica quartet have pretty much appeared out of nowhere, but they'll soon have stadiums swooning to crash-chord anthems such as Breaking Walls.By the time singer Evan Koga is joined by Danny and Michael Fujikawa on the harmonised chorus of opening track The Minute I Saw It, you can almost hear the click of a thousand cigarette lighters.
Chief could well end up funding a generation of art-rock albums for those crafty Domino Records heads. Will they be the latest addition to the label’s chart-crashing run of Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys? Maybe. Chief’s songs have a universal quality – you can imagine them blasting from humid traffic jams or rambunctiously recited by a gaggle of inebriated festival revellers.
On the other hand, Chief don’t appear to be pop star material. Visually they’re more at home with the check shirts and beards of, say,
Band of Horses. If anything, their music is about classicism without the throwback, calling upon those West Coast, Americana and country-rock touchstones yet remaining completely modern. Imagine The Band’s country-soul harmonics given a robust 21st-century makeover, with no small part played by Grammy-clutching producer Emery Dobyns (Antony & the Johnsons, Battles, Mary J Blige).
There's a folky side to all of this, elements of CSNY coursing through the veins of In the Valley, while the boozy-woozy Irish Song boasts a broken-hearted nostalgia and weepy violin that will stop the most cynical souls in their tracks. Failed romance is the common theme, fading in and out of Modern Rituals like a recurring dream, or a modern ritual even. Koga's bruised lyrics portray someone either searching for something or running away from something else. Often enough, it sounds like the same thing. See myspace.com/chieftheband
Download tracks: Breaking Walls, In the Valley
