New kids on the block: Captured from the quiet east coast of Yorkshire – inspired from the Middle East – heralds the ethereal shoegaze drive of Feral Family.
A debut album of bleak realities and forgotten towns, Without Motion, taunts at a much darker fable slabbed in garishly echoes from that of a cavern wall or a barren dock at a quiet seaside town.
It’s an album awash in the trails and tribulations of growing up from naive adolescent to the unforgiving path of adulthood. It neither backs down in colour or provides a sunny alternative either. It’s hideously relentless and hungry in deliverance, a DNA the band stands by. A supportive pillar to the UK’s crucial live scene, the band stake something real in the ground ahead of a fulfilling year on the road.
Placing Jamie Lowe’s sneering vocal and warp-speed wit front-and-centre – interspersed with pneumatic rhythmic clatter – has able-minded fans clambering for similarities in works of Joy Division, Interpol and Foals. But it’s certainly nothing without its originality in curiosity and feverishly hungry trials.
The album kicks off with Cairo, a cinematic telling with cutthroat hometruths before we’re thrown into This Side Of Me; a murky grower that lurches into an upended chorus as we battle with our darker selves. While the first half of the album had us fooled with the guitars awash in stark ambience, Wee Van Bee enters the fray. The spaghetti-Western inspired shootout is an enthralling scene, as the American decadence of the Midwest is charted to Bridlington’s smalltown pharmaceutical scene. The post-apocalyptic bombast of Spice King has the cinematic masterpiece of Denis’s Dune at the front of its mind, as it transports to the sprawling barrens of an unfamiliar desert planet. As the canvas is stripped back for Deep Cuts, it makes the feeling somewhat more heartfelt as we’re swathed with electro-acoustics and a pulsing acadence while the pulsating Fractured tells us tales of second lives and unearthing lives in the spooky outbacks of the Middle East.
You could argue that everything Feral Family have cultivated would put the band on the next chopping block of a band awash in the saturation of the swathing indie rock landfill. But, the gripping narratives and the Middle East-inspired sounds bring a new added sense that Feral Family are something different, something to get excited about.
Having supported the likes of The View and The Lilacs at shows across the Winter of 2023, the group will be hitting the road for a further run of headline shows in February 2024 in support of their debut.
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