Ambitious, engaging and utterly unpredictable. Birmingham indie-rock heroes Johnny Foreigner are back again – and they’ve got something to say.
Release Date: 20th September 2024
Label: Alcopop! Records
Formats: CD / Vinyl / Digital
LIKE BUSES…
They’re like busses, aren’t they? We don’t hear anything from Birmingham’s indie-rock heroes, Johnny Foreigner for something like 8 years and then, suddenly, along come two albums in quick succession.
Actually, to be fair, the band’s June 2024 offering, the expansively-titled The Sky and Sea Were Part of Me, Or I Was Part of Them wasn’t strictly an album, according to the definition of ‘album’ that the band seemingly employ. More accurately, it was a 9-track EP, released as a taster for the main event: this new album, How To Be Hopeful.
Let’s recap, for a moment. Johnny Foreigner are: Alexei Barrow (guitar & vocals), Kelly Parker (bass & vocals), Junior Elvis Washington Laidley (drums and backing vocals) and Lewes Herriot (guitar and backing vocals). The band came together, in Birmingham, in 2005 and How To Be Helpful is their 7th album – their first since 2016’s Mono No Aware.
SOMETHING OF VALUE TO SAY
There are many people around who thought we’d lost Johnny Foreigner for good during that lengthy 2016-2024 hiatus but the band never closed down the possibility of another album. But, any new album would be on the band’s terms and would only be made if the members believed that they had something of value to say; and it seems that they DO have something of value to say, as they’ve been at pains to explain:
“Feels like a huge privilege to release a loud righteous rock record about finding love and joy in the universe at a point where such things are in such universal short supply. This release is 28 months past deadline; our timing has always sucked. But honestly we’ve had little choice; How to be Hopeful is a pure product of chaos magic. It compelled us to be made, to harness returning ripples of stones long since thrown. It felt way too significant, too personal, too full of moments worth savouring and patterns playing out, to rush. Also, we are old and have real jobs now.
It’s actually 2 matched parallel soundtracks, 1 per side, for a 12 month period where the worst, then the weirdest, then the best possible things happened. Same series of events, different ripples, chaos and consequence and everything connected This is our celebration record, our fell-in-love-and-stopped-worrying album, the glowing cathartic coda that we couldn’t help but channel. The least Johnny Foreigner of albums; nearly 3 years of obsessive planning and constructing, executive produced by 2007 anti-nostalgia us, and 2016 us who stopped being a band when we ran out of things worth singing about.”
AMBITIOUS, ENGAGING AND UTTERLY UNPREDICTABLE
If you haven’t come across Johnny Foreigner before, prepare to be challenged, confused and, ultimately, rewarded. The band’s music is a heady amalgam of punky free expression, heavy metal riffage, indie jangle and thought-provoking (and occasionally impenetrable) lyrics. Sometimes they recall The Stone Roses, at other times, it’s the theatrical rock of Deaf School that comes to mind but, most of the time, Johnny Foreigner’s music is theirs and theirs alone: ambitious, engaging and utterly unpredictable.
glorious cacophonies
It’s a typical feature of the band’s sound that their glorious cacophonies conceal a tight regimen of order and that contrast of freedom and control is readily evident in opening track, Roisin Does Advice Now, a song that reminded me of Sparks, mixed with heavy metal and then given a punk makeover. And that ability to retain a tight discipline even when things seem to be spiraling out of control is perhaps even more evident in the slightly (but only slightly) poppier The Blazing World.
In my recent review of The Sky and Sea…, I described What The Alexei – one of just two tracks from that EP to be reprised here – as “…a manic, frantic rap, crammed with observational lyrics that, perhaps, owe a line of lineage – if not a debt – to Beefheart’s The Blimp,” and that’s a description that I stand by. The guitars are tight and the lyrics – which include shrewd observations like: “I can hardly sleep for dreaming, you know exactly how I’m feeling. It’s not even the fifth-best thing about you; I don’t think I’ll ever capture the different ways you matter” – are fired out with joyous abandon.
The gently-strummed guitars that accompany the mellow Museum Of Useless things come as something of a surprise. The song could almost be a ballad but, then again, whoever heard of a ballad with lyrics like: “Post a picture out of context – isn’t that how you kids get famous these days?” And that’s one of the song’s simpler lines; elsewhere, the lyrics are as bafflingly dystopian as the plot to The Prisoner was!
The dramatic, slow-building Orc Damage is the second track from The Sky and Sea… to make the cut here – a wise choice that, I suspect, was intended right from the outset. Arguably the album’s strongest and most memorable track, the song’s tight, punchy and gloriously heavy theme is the perfect match for uncompromising lyrics like: “Let’s deal some damage, let’s seed some panic, let’s split some families up.”
thrash punk dressings
We’re already well familiar with Johnny Foreigner’s ability to use their jangling guitars, throbbing basslines and crisp drum rhythms to create a ‘Stone Roses for the 2020s’ type of sound and that’s a skill that they exercise for the gentle, vulnerable, OK 1 More, before the band take things to the opposite extreme with the fascinating This Is a Joke. I use the word ‘fascinating’ deliberately; it’s the best word I can find to describe a song that could very well have been a jolly pop tune before the thrash/punk dressing was applied and, besides, you don’t get lyrics like: “…you don’t see no trans folx on TV, just a parade of divorced ex-celebrities telling me that they’re scared to pee” in your common-or-garden jolly pop tune.
opening lines
Alexei specialises in great opening lines and, once the music starts, Dark Tetris is as frantic and punky as the song’s opening couplet: “So Lauren’s back on drugs. And I don’t know if I should laugh or if that dope’s still dangerous” suggests it will be. It’s another of the album’s many highlights.
It’s not quite a singalong track – Johnny Foreigner don’t do those – but the chiming guitars, sharp punchy rhythm and precision drumming on Their Shining Path – one of the album’s more accessible tracks – does draw the listener in, as does the equally-accessible A Sea to Scream At, in which the chugging drive of the verses sits in sharp contrast with the heavy intensity of the song’s “It’s the scale of the company” chorus. It’s not a straight-ahead rocker by any means, but there are certainly fewer sharp curves to negotiate than there are on some of the album’s more challenging songs.
TAKE THE TIME TO UNDERSTAND
And Alexei throws out another attention-grabbing opening line: “There are nights you can’t tell between the sea and skyline, screaming ‘f*ck this timeline’ from the shore” to launch penultimate track, Emily and Alex. Alexei’s vocals are gentle and reflective, and the backing is stripped right back to a single guitar, on the closest thing the album contains to a reflective folk song. Even so, with the experience of just about every other track in mind, the listener is kept on a cliff-edge, wondering when the heavy riffs will kick in. But they don’t, Not this time.
It’s left to closing track, We Build This City to pull all the threads of How To Be Hopeful together to form a tight, cohesive ball. It’s all here: the Stone Roses’ signature jangly guitar, pattering drumbeat and resonant bass, that alternates with tight, extreme riffage and punky excess, and the ever-impenetrable lyrics: “It’s about a stone’s throw: I’d like that! Whatever comes next, all pretty sunsets. I’d like that!”
We’ve been waiting for this one and How To Be Hopeful doesn’t disappoint. It’s challenging and, in places, it’s baffling. But, take the time to listen and the time to understand and it’ll all fall into place.
Watch the lyric video to What the Alexei – a track from the album – here:
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