Beauty Shop Crisis Helpline

It's been a while since I've looked forward to the release of an album as much as this. Based around the songwriting of John Hoeffleur, The Beauty Shop are an Illinois based three-piece signed to (Teenage Fanclub drummer/pop virtuoso of Nice Man repute) Francis Macdonald's Shoeshine label. Their debut, Yr Money Or Yr Life (an augmentation of the even earlier Grief E.P) is one of my favourite albums of all time, a settling mix of Leonard Cohen/Violent Femmes-esque alt-country macabre and really, really good song structures. So a fair and balanced perspective then.

It's taken (at least) the best part of three years for Crisis Helpline to emerge. After a series of ring tones the first words we here are "Passed out underneath the disco ball". The ensuing Paper Hearts For Josie is ridiculously good, kind of a logical continuation from Yr Money... Put unclearly, it's like Leonard Cohen overdosing on Blood On The Tracks then sweating it out over Mudhoney records and David Lynch's Straight Story. The ensuing Monster makes like Ken Kesey with shades of In Utero and jangle-pop. I'd guess it's a fucked-up relationship song, but it doesn't really matter when it encompasses this much. The words are too good to pick a selection out.

Elsewhere on Babyshaker, Hoeffleur's back exploring a healthy interest in human imitation and modification, along with loads of other good stuff (paranoia, teen groups, humanoids, etc.). Trust this man when he growls "the song I sing is for the black-outs". The Love I Could Not Save is a bit of a curve-ball, the chorus makes suspiciously like a cod-grunge power-ballad, but elsewhere (couplets like "the ticket stubs and scraps of us") it's like Kurt Cobain or Johnny Cash doctoring the Here Comes the Sun riff. Needless to say one song later Hoeffleur's asking to be buried alive with an ambience that makes me think of crackheads and Billy Holliday (Hatchet Job). Rumplestiltskin Lives is like Tim Burton excreting middle-America. It reminds me of Chuck Berry.

The penultimate A Desperate Cry For Help is the kind of song that should be included on local clear channel satellites as a concession for those of us with souls. Shades of Lennon/McCartney drowning their livers in residual bitterness, children's television, and that mimed duet in A Life Less Ordinary abound. There are so many killer concepts involved its ridiculous, from a new sickness where the victim dies laughing which "paints you pale with a fresh coat of indifference", to a brief sardonic statement that "everyone's included here, no one gets away".

Crisis Helpline, like its predecessor, has the strength of including three or four immediately killer tunes, before after two or three solid listens, I can barely hear a flaw. The Beauty Shop are one of my favourite bands, so in that sense it's no surprise I'm impressed by this record. Equally it had to live up to over a year's anticipation (see my Hail To The Thief review), and proved to be as good as hoped. I rate it at least as highly as my other favourite releases from the last year (Johnny Dowd, Futureheads, Phoenix, The Streets) and can potentially see it becoming another album I'll still listen to fairly regularly in three years time. I can't really ask for more.