Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 17/3/08
Label: Merok Records

There is a black hole where this album's soul should be. An infinite, amoral void which sucks in all the intellectually bankrupt detritus of contemporary pop culture. Look, there's the first series of "Skins" being pulled in right now. There's Nicole Richie. There's Vice magazine. The London borough of Hoxton. A 19-year-old blogger in skinny jeans. A rock star's daughter, staggering out of the Punk nightclub in a £3000 dress. And, hey, right on time, here's three twentysomethings from Paris, with the band they started out as a joke.

Taken entirely at face value, The Teenagers are a cold, hateful proposition, as sneering and arrogant as any of the hipsters you'll find propping up the bar at the Old Blue Last. Single "Homecoming" is a perfect example. In perfect Nathan Barley-esqe style, singer Quentin Delafon relates a tale of seducing his teenager step cousin ("It was wild/She's such a slut"), signing-off with her saying "Don't forget to send me a friend request", and him laughing "As if." The chorus says it all. He crows: "I f*cked my American c*nt." She sighs: "I loved my English romance."

We've been here before, of course. The above is also the plot line to "Summer Nights" from "Grease", pretty much. Which gets you wondering - how much of this is theatre rather than autobiography? And if it is theatre, what's the intent? In "Sunset Beach" - another teen drama reference of a kind - the dumb narrator chats up an equally vacuous girl ("She impresses me with her ipod plays, from Slayer to Aerosmith. No f*cking Jeff Buckley"), and takes her back to his, only for her to steal his guitar while he's in the shower. He sounds crushed in the chorus: "She left with the sun light/I cried through the moon light…"

Buy into the notion that The Teenagers are in fact a satirical comment on the "Shockwaves Generation", and this is a dry, impeccably observed album, closer in spirit to Arab Strap than any of the nu-rave favourites. "Feeling Better" - like the album as a whole, catchy New Order-style synth pop - declares: "If you need a band cos you want to dance/Or you're missing your friends because you don't have any/Well we don't care/Just buy our t-shirts and talk about us everywhere." That's either a barbed comment on careerist bands or a little too honest for their own good. It has to be the former.

Exactly how much longevity there is in this enterprise is uncertain - the point has been made now, surely? - but there is enough here to suggest that the second album could be one to cherish. There's a romantic sadness at the heart of some of these songs that feels genuine, and the cinematography in "Streets Of Paris" is quietly hypnotic. Once the Teenagers get over the fact that they started as a joke band, they might really be worth taking seriously.

    by Ian Watson