Chapel Club are a band that seek to slice the satire that bands have become; they are much more concerned with making something personal and worthwhile than transient and popular.
For them, Chapel Club is just that; a team, a squadron, an opportunity to enjoy the things you live for most within a collective. It’s just that, in this Chapel Club - unlike the one the religious fanatics in your school went to - things get a little intense.
Live and indeed on record, they craft an art of evasive intensity, one rich in cultural allusions and personal tales of Lewis’ (the band’s front man) life.
The tales, mirrored with the bands grand sense of reservation and cut-throat totality concern the things that Lewis knows happen to everyone in life.
Talking to him, he explained that the band's glummest songs come from moments that naturally occur.
“I just think that life, love, the world etc. are strange and confusing – and sometimes some of that strangeness or confusion finds its way into the songs.”
His aura is one of a humble narrator, happy to receive praise but quick to rebuff hyperbolic fanfares. Though his fiendish honesty quakes in Chapel Clubs set, like a British, less coarse version of Tom Waits.
And his songs contain lyrics such as “Dust in my heart, dust in my veins” the cold, calm and collected image of Chapel Club isn’t as simple as just another set of gloom rockers.
What is truly magnificent and unique about the band is that they convey a mood without being moody, their live sound is polished to within a millimetre of misanthropic perfection, with Lewis refraining from speech and only offering the odd “Thank-you” and “Sorry” a boy with manners and talent, he’s going to go far!
The reason that calling Chapel Club “doomed” or “dark” is wrong is because they’re so much more complex than that.
You only have to speak to Lewis about his and the bands influences to see that this isn’t a Joy Division rip-off, this is a private project built on, if not subversive, then selfish influences.
They want Chapel Club to speak for anyone who wants to be heard, but no-one in particular – these art-loving, Arthur Russell fans don’t as Lewis says want to “feel trapped by the definitions of others.”
Having said that, for the rest of the review, that is partly what I am going to do, not by trapping them but by releasing my version of their live show and their existance.
For that is the crux of the band, everyone will like different things about them, and everyone will have a different way to paint their portrait.
What struck me most about Chapel Club live was the stance that Lewis took. He stands, staring into his slender, crooked palm, a palm that seemingly holds the secrets to his songs; his unforgiving glare rests entirely upon them.
He seems to hide, a skeleton behind his Mistress Microphone, a friend he dare not let go but an enemy too cruel to cling to – as he practices this hypnotic stance of still mania, his band members crush and crucify the nimble souls of their well-dressed feet; frenetic and frenzied offering the perfect sense of juxtaposition against the highly descriptive and often haunting poetry that looms above the songs –a forgotten ritual.
A set of just seven songs includes the delightfully worrying “Surfacing” a song that Lewis explained was written “intended as a menacing song, it’s a hate song.”
Though they don’t want to be spokespeople for the cynical generation, there is a sense that Chapel Club could front an emergence of a new-wave of new-wave bands.
Here in Liverpool Korova, Lewis often resembles the equally menacing Julian Cope and like The Teardrop Explodes, perhaps one of the most enigmatic and important bands to ever emerge from Liverpool, Chapel Club offer piercing romance after fiendish honesty – a tick-tocking equation that looks effortless but resounds so frighteningly eloquent and ambient.
A true tone setter for an industry that Lewis is not shy of criticizing.
“I’m not really concerned about image and stuff though, I think there’s far more pressure to sound a certain way than to look a certain way, and people are entitled to dress how they want to dress etc.
"Of course, it’s a shame when appearance is everything and the music lags behind, but those kinds of artists aren’t my thing anyway.”
For me, the set’s highlight is “All the Eastern Girls” a sadistic account of London town that begins romantic and ends struggling to find the romance.
With the refrain “This is a love song” reverberating like the motif of an amnesiac, struggling to remember a past love; it’s just a snippet of Chapel Club’s sound and progression but it sticks out with its sensual hook and heart aching sentiment.
Chapel Club represent a cross-section of society that deserves its voice, they’re not spokespeople as such, but interested observers, the ghostly forefathers of most teenagers on the verge on their fist life-affirming novel or movie.
They’re a band for culture vultures and dissident advocates of black and grey; they’d never admit to this though, for them, they’re simply Chapel Club “playing a clutch of songs, pretty loud and pretty tight”
A shamelessly modest but unfitting description for a band that signal a change in the times and movement in the waters, though they write songs that conjure up images of sharks circling with menace and danger, the irony is that they are the sharks, sharpened teeth and acute vision, sniffing fear and blood and converting them to gospels for the outsiders of our world.
Chapel Club’s new single “FIVE TREES” is available on 7” & download from 31st May.
http://www.myspace.com/chapelclub
http://chapelclub.com/
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