Courting: Lust for Life review – overwrought concept album pulls its punches

The Liverpool band’s drive for creative risk-taking is admirable, but the experiment doesn’t pay off on this disappointingly messy and scant third album.

Depending on your perspective, Courting’s new album, Lust for Life, Or: ‘How to Thread the Needle and Come Out the Other Side To Tell the Story’ was always destined to be genius or disastrous. Frontman Sean Murphy-O’Neill was clear about his ambitions in his interviews before release day: there would be a ‘mirrored’ track list (each song has a musically-related pair), a promise of multiple lyrical ‘Easter eggs’, an overriding theme of duality exemplified by the two figures on the monochrome cover art and that exhausting two-part album title.

In a rock landscape of unadventurous yet ever successful 2000s indie revivalists – I’m looking at you, Circa Waves – it’s hard to fault Murphy-O’Neill’s drive to deliver a high-art modern rock classic. Last year’s New Last Name came with a grand love narrative, but really it was all about a few stellar singles, not least Flex, which brilliantly conveyed the blissful ignorance of youth, sounding a bit like Carly Rae Jepsen if she made rock for teen boys rather than pop for teen girls.

It’s a disappointment, then, that the new album trailered as the culmination of Courting’s ‘evolution’ thus far weighs in at a meagre 25 minutes and eight tracks, two of which are instrumental tone-setters. O’Neill has talked about the band’s newfound search for conciseness but on this, their third album in a little over three years, the end result just feels rushed and underwritten. The lyrical cross-references and much-touted “hidden depths” are no doubt bountiful, but it’s a shame that Courting couldn’t spend more time fleshing out their numerous intriguing ideas.

True to Courting’s willingness to push stylistic boundaries, Lust for Life opens with a challenge to the listener, the cascading strings of Rollback Intro brushing up against the incongruous breakbeats of Stealth Rollback. It’s a willfully incohesive cold open, but the switch from one extreme to the other only makes the eventual callbacks to Rollback Intro at the end of the album feel contrived.

Those opening two tracks also overpromise wild experimentalism in the track list ahead, but instead we get four fairly standard fare Courting tracks: Pause at You impresses with its acrobatic bassline, and After You is a hauntingly creepy stalker tale but, bar the occasional sax lick, Lust for Life pulls its experimental rock punches. Sure, it’s not exactly radio fodder, but it compares unfavourably with the other rock pioneers of our day: Fontaines D.C.’s poetic angst, Horsegirl’s mathematical beauty or, most pertinently, Geordie Greep’s breathtaking alt-rock monstrosities.

The multi-phased title track is more intriguing, but encounters Courting’s old foe – painfully heavy-handed autotune, which wrings every drop of emotion out of O’Neill’s voice in the plaintive opening section. Likely place for them to be closes the record with some impressively intricate guitar work, but ends before it’s really got going. “It’s over, it’s over,” O’Neill intones. Indeed it is, and much too soon.