With a band name that sounds like a What Three Words location, East London country-indie slackers vegas water taxi are back with album number two, following up on their critically acclaimed debut, 2023’s things are gonna be alright. Well, it’s not really an album in the truest sense, more of an amalgamation of projects, as it’s made up of two separate EP’s, last year’s long time caller and the newly released first time listener.
They were formed in the wake of lead singer Ben Hambro’s previous project, the cult performance-art collective Lazarus Kane, and sees him joined by Fred Lawton (bass/guitar), Charlie Meyrick (drums/guitar), and Molly Shields (backing vocals), with collaborators Rhodri Brooks on pedal steel and Holly Carpenter on violin and recorded again with producer Louis Milburn (Folly Group).
The debut record opened up some doors on the live stage to with gig slots alongside the likes of Katy J Pearson, Westside Cowboy and Divorce, and such was the love and demand for it, it was re-released in an expanded version last summer, so the focus is really on how they have progressed onto record number two.
It continues it’s wry, observational style of writing, which becomes obvious from just a cursory glance of the song titles, they’re crushingly knowing, the likes of ‘ozempic’, ‘birkenstocks’, ‘brat summer,’ ‘jamie xx‘, to name but a few, and Hambro’s description of the material, “super sad pop songs” pretty much hits the nail on the head, they may be given an alt-country sheen and twist, but at their heart they are simplistic in tone, however much they feel clever-clever lyrically.
