Album Review: Young Chasers by Circa Waves

The debut full-length album from Liverpool outfit Circa Waves, 2015's Young Chasers, is a gleefully frenetic, youthfully exuberant collection of catchy, guitar-based indie rock. Centered on lead singer/songwriter Kieran Shudall, the group also showcases the talents of guitarist Joe Falconer, bassist Sam Rourke, and drummer Colin Jones. Together, they make an urgent, angular style of stripped-down pop that touches upon '80s dance-punk and '90s slacker rock without ever giving in too much to either.

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As four Liverpudlian lads playing jaunty, catchy three-minute pop songs on guitars – no ’50s slant, no electronic R&B, not the tiniest hint of a psychedelic tribal sacrifice – you won’t be allowed to like Circa Waves. Snobs will demand this debut album comes plastered with stickers reading ‘Warning: Contains Blatant Strokes And Toxic Levels Of Kook, View And Wombat’. Sniping reviewers will paint their fans as filthy scavengers of the indie landfill, gnawing on the rotting carcass of The Pigeon Detectives.

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If the petition to prevent Kanye from headlining Glastonbury affirmed anything, it was that the tribalistic belligerence of indie-rock fans is still very much intact. The debut from Liverpool’s Circa Waves should satisfy those keening for “real music”: buoyant, boyish and polished, it’s an album consisting of four men, two guitars and a bunch of Reading and Leeds festival-rousing choruses. Young Chasers is the sound of being 17, and specifically being 17 in 2005: retro(ish)-fetishism is rife, with traces of We Are Scientists, the Kooks, the Libertines and Razorlight, while frontman Kieran Shudall cavorts his adolescence sweetly, pining for “T-shirt weather”, fearing that “Friday night will break me” and vulnerably wishing he were not “a long way from home” on single Fossils.

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