Album Review – The Hopeful Boy Replacement Service by Sandras’s Wedding (2023) (Subjangle)
Those of you who follow this blog will know that I have wibbled on like some sort of gushing fanboy over the talents of this Goole UK-based trio, Sandra’s Wedding, over the course of the previous four albums they have released since 2017.
Of course, if you have ever listened to the band, you will know that such exuberance feels so very apposite to the sound, essence, and feeling that their music portrays. Their aesthetic is one of resignation to life’s lot in the UK’s small northern towns muddled together with perhaps even the slightest hint of stoic celebration of it, or at least the glorious acknowledgement that they ‘get by’.
Always keenly observational of the meaning of life, the fifth The Hopeful Boy Replacement Service albums’ lyrics are permanently tinged with melancholy rather than heaving with it as the realization that aspirations of better things are not ever likely to be the destiny for the average small town boy.
This is emphasized with the always omnipotent Paul Heaton-style qualities of Joe Hodgson’s voice delivering matter-of-fact lines about saying “goodbye to your sorry town”(This Be The Verse), the permanent accompaniment of the damp in “let the raindrops dangle beside you” (title track) and all culminating in the muted despair of “I’m looking for the words to bear my soul” in the closing Berlin Wall and Other Stories, which feels like a precisely placed, ominously sad full stop.
However, the release does break free from the above beautifully sad dank in Rum Life, French Girls, and Laughing My Head Off. Here the ‘pop’ of the jangly indie-pop is accentuated as tunes, and melodies are exacted with precision to take us on the same journey through the banalities and uniformity of life (as wonderfully alluded to referred French Girls as “Groundhog Life’) in a manner that is far more enthusiastic than it should be.
However, this utilization of The Housemartins and Belle and Sebastian’s musical tool of telling ‘nasty little stories in lovely little ways’ never feels more apt than when it is employed within the Sandra’s Wedding aesthetic.
Possibly one of the great unheralded acts of our era, Sandra’s Wedding continue to reach new levels with every release.
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