Record labels still aren't doing their jobs properly as the debut album from The Teenagers seems less to have been released, more just turned up, unannounced, on your back porch. However, take comfort in the fact that The Teenagers themselves are very much excelling in their job - that is creating the music to soundtrack Bret Easton Ellis' own debut effort, Less Than Zero.
Reality Check is what you may expect - ice cold, self-referential lyrics abound amongst layers of fuzz. This sounds like a stream of conscious from a selfish 19 year old. And yet it is still good.
"Homecoming" has been re-tooled and re-edited and sounds fresher as a result. Were it not for the genuinely revealing bridge, new single "Love No" would sound like the most dishearteningly portrait of relationship dysfunction. It's still dysfunctional, but the honesty gives the dysfunction a context and a reason.
"Starlett Johanson" is still the name-dropping victory of style over substance it aims to be. "Feeling Better" manages optimism and features a picked out guitar line that it sounds like they stole from a mid-era New Order record no-one was using.
Reality Check succeeds in achieving it's goals and as a result it not only deserves respect and success, it also deserves to be regarded as one of 2008's coolest records. The question is more: where can we go now? Can this thin sheen of fame-riddled post-punk survive another album or is this more a case of 'Disappear Here'?
BP x