There’s something unbearably appealing about pop music that is not ashamed to categorise itself as such. You can imagine it wearing eyeliner and gold suits, but doing so in darkened rooms at the back of Wolverhampton pubs rather than on the stages of former music halls.Īnd though it shouldn’t make a difference to how good a review their music gets, don’t they look stylish and all together lovely, the kind of pop urchins you could take home to your mother, standing them in the corner and letting them busk away all night? The gorgeous cover to their album, showing a ship wrecked on an iceberg, is also beautiful, though their music is nowhere as cold as this image implies.

The result falls happily somewhere between the late ’70s/early ’80s glam pop, its revival at the height of Britpop and the retro tones that everyone from The Killers to The Long Blondes have returned to recently. They are Birmingham-based, and three of the tracks here are produced by Editors‘ sound engineer Nick Ingram, who also produced Adventure Club’s earliest demos, while the album is produced by Phil Vinall, who has previously done the deed for everyone from Placebo to Snow Patrol to Babyshambles. There are elements of Pulp to be heard in their radio-friendly ditties, and in their vocals, and traces of both Roxy Music and Lloyd Cole And The Commotions in their delivery.

No pretentions, no deep messages, just catchy hooks and good songs.

Adventure Club are Oliver Williams and Ryan Davis, two childhood friends who have grown up to produce a full, layered and ecstatic album full of good, old-fashioned pop tunes.

Adventure club songs