Album Review: Spector – Enjoy It While It Lasts

London five piece Spector have successfully achieved the feat of bridging the gap between melancholic pop music and indie rock, a gap that bands like The Killers and The Pigeon Detectives tried, and ultimately failed, to do. As admirable and indicative of the band’s quality as this is, it does lose a little of its value considering how left they’ve left it to do so.

Enjoy It While It Lasts is a good record, filled with nostalgia. Singles ‘Chevy Thunder’ and ‘Celestine’ are certainly the biggest tracks on the record – boasting huge choruses, strong vocal work from frontman Fred Macpherson, and pulsating percussion. While ‘Twenty Nothing’ hints at the album’s nostalgia with its tales of growing up and growing apart. But it’s the devastating ‘Never Fade Away’ that stands out here, closing the album out in bittersweet fashion.

This definitely plays to the point that Spector are making music that hasn’t really been made for a while and, good a record as it is, I can’t help but think Enjoy It While It Lasts would have benefitted from a release five years ago, when guitar music was enjoying its time in the spotlight. Now, it serves only as a nostalgic look at what today’s twenty-somethings had on their iPod Nano’s in the mid-2000s, which detracts somewhat from its value in the modern music landscape – it’s nice to listen to, but it’s essentially the musical equivalent of Fiona Bruce presenting Antiques Roadshow. It doesn’t really matter how you try to shake up the format; at the end of the day you’re still flogging old chairs.

In this case, Enjoy It While It Lasts is undeniably an old chair, but it’s definitely one worth sitting on.

-Matt Mansfield