Cargo Records

Out Of Focus/ Budget Flight To Faro

On the one hand, this is a black vinyl full stop to nail a scattershot year of musical offerings. Debut double A-side single We’re All Going To Die / Heroics was followed by Disappearing Act, a digital single which received airplay on BBC 6Music from Gary Crowley, Steve Lamacq and Tom Robinson. Hot on its heels came the diverse and critically embraced short album The Yellow Mini and, most recently, a free download EP, Another Summer Burning.

Say what you will, but we are no slackers. At the same time, this single is an advance warning, a scouting party, a declaration of intent even. The rumble just beyond the horizon? That’ll be the full-length Jonny Cola & The A-Grades album, a work very much in progress, awaiting its moment. As a song, “Out Of Focus” is at one and the same time shamelessly classical and an instant classic. We’ve been to the bars, we’ve seen the bands, we’ve met the right people and  slept with them when the occasion demanded, but we need more. There has to be more – more than tongue-in-cheek disco chic and in-crowd banalities, more than anti-melodic  so-niche-it-hurts indie. We still believe in dreams, in never giving up. Those marks on our foreheads, those brick wall stigmata – we wear them with pride.“Out Of Focus” is backed with a second miniature epic. “Budget Flight To Faro” was recorded on a shoestring for inclusion on Another Summer Burning, but it quickly became clear that the song deserved a second outing on a more tangible platform. It has already received 6Music airplay from Gary Crowley, who described it as a “fine example” of the band’s “glam-tinged Britpop” – a tag refined elsewhere to simply “Glitpop”. You spy with your little eye an angle, perchance? Britpop revivalists? Hardly. We are no Frankensteins, reanimating the fetid corpse of a Primrose Hill fantasy to soundtrack New Camden (Stables Market requisitioned for a 21st century Dawn Of The Dead). We understand that you will believe what you wish, but allow us this... The tunesmiths, the songcrafters, the lovers were not dreamed up in an early-’90s focus group and, despite the Fallujah of Be Here Now, the wound-licking of Kid A, we never went away. We were simply on mute, rendered as subtitles. And guess what – the sound just came flooding back.