Album review

Len Price 3

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added: 7 Jan 2010 // release date: 18 Jan 2010 // label: Wicked Cool
reviewer: Andy Snipper

What an absolute joy to find a band that not only takes its cues from the great British pop bands of the sixties and seventies but also creates new pop classics without any embarrassment over their influences. This is half an hour of the best pop I’ve heard for ages.

The band wear their influences happily on their sleeves and The Who, The Hollies, The Small Faces, The Beatles, The Stones and even The Jam all happily troop past but the songs are genuinely great pop on their own account and even though you occasionally find yourself listening to a track like ‘The Girl Who Became A Machine’ and hear a classic piece of sixties freak-out or ‘Mr Grey’ which is all Kinks meets The Beatles you also tap your feet and play air drums like a loon. It is rare to find a band who can combine classic themes with modern language and not come off sounding cheap and tacky but The Len Price 3 (who IS Len Price?) manage it.

The band play brilliantly: Glen Page is a fine acid-tinged guitarist and vocalises and harmonises with a real Medway accent while Steve Huggins bass is solid but for me the real star here is drummer Neil Fromow who is the nearest thing I have ever heard to my great hero Keith Moon. As with all of the great bands they sound like a much bigger band than the numbers suggest and they are completely a BAND - the whole sound is dependent on the three of them and it wouldn’t be the same with any one else. A lot of the credit has to go to their producers Jim Riley, Graham Day and Kris Harris as well and whoever decided to record the whole thing on analogue equipment deserves a medal. For vinyl addicts there will even be a vinyl version with extra tracks on it!

Track after track after track of this pass by your ears and every one is a little gem, any of these really would have charted back in the day and in modern terms they really only have a few contemporaries to compare to: Arctic Monkeys, Supercharge or The Streets.

My first 5 star review of the year and if I hear a better pop album in 2010 it will really be a great year.

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