BATTLE LINES

In calling themselves Battle Lines, today’s Tipping Point tip have perfectly summed up their latest offering, I feel.  ‘Colonies’, the latest track from the Leeds based quartet, seems to be fraught with inner conflict. A blistered lullaby, packed with clashing lyrical paradoxes, always battling with noisy instrumentation. It swerves dramatically and drastically from dream like pop atmospherics, to a riotous and raw cacophony of screeching guitars and crashing drums.

In truth, it’s a dark and not entirely comfortable listen, but all the more rewarding for it. That’s, in part, thanks to some rather unsettling lyrics, combined with Carly Humphries’ dry delivery, from its opening declaration of “taken to a field/I told him to try out things/ I did not intend to feel” to its brutal honest “his dreamy eyes lay into me, blistered me with insecurity” and culminating in the powerfully hypnotic, confessional refrain of “Nothing, nothing, you mean nothing to me.”

The result is a frightfully, angst riddled slice of, what the band themselves describe as, dark cerebral pop.  If, indeed, the Battle Lines have been drawn, Colonies is ready to come out fighting.

Words by George Shaw

Tipped by Whiskas