The Fratellis - Mistress Mabel

 

It might not be the fault of The Fratellis, but this morning when I close my eyes all I see is the opening credits to 70s episodes of Doctor Who, all swirling wormholes and time travelling vortexes of garish purple and grey.

It may be the dodgy coffee from my local cornershop twisting my still sleepy brain, it could be the squelchy da-da-da-dum Moogish keyboard intro to Mistress Mabel (the subject of today’s wordy frolics), or it could be that every now and again it’s just healthy and right for a man to reflect on snippets of his sci-fi past.

Nah. Mistress Mabel is a yawning rehash of a thousand things I’ve heard before, the sum of lots of other stuff that didn’t really do it for me either and a spiralling hole of anti matter, dragging me reluctantly back to a time I only just left, is just all that springs to mind.

For some reason, maybe the pacey guitars and bubbling keyboards, Mistress Mabel reminds me a little of Gay Dad’s To Earth With Love, except that To Earth With Love is an awesome record that still lifts me a hundred feet in the air, and this isn’t.

It’s not that I don’t like The Fratellis, Chelsea Dagger was a great drunken brawl of a single and Flathead to has a good quota of Stella friendly da-ba-da-ba-doing. Plus, thank god for Fratellis videos, full of pouting girls in stockings and basques fawning over the band and it’s ok to lap it up because they’re cool burlesque stars, not like those misogynist R&B videos, right?

Maybe that’s what’s missing here. Take away the knees up mother brown isms and cheeky vaudeville and you’re left with a pretty mediocre band. If The Fratellis are keen on plundering the 20^th century they could do worse than reinvent themselves as a scat band, then they could do-be-do and ba-da-da till their hearts content without subjecting us to the torturous and seemingly endless rhyming of Mabel with unable and table and unstable and cradle and fable. Whoever gave The Fratellis a rhyming dictionary, throw yourself off a cliff, forthwith.

4/10

Mistress Mabel is released on 26^th May on Island with new album Here We Stand following on the 9th June.

Get Mistress Mabel from iTunes

Get Here We Stand from Play.com or iTunes

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