BLAB – Full Grown

Southend DIY artist BLAB has returned with her new single ‘Full Grown’ via Cool Thing Records (Asylums / Suspects). Self-produced, largely at home in her bedroom, writer and producer Fran Murray follows the playfully destructive ‘Hate Love, Make Love’ released in September. Banner image courtesy of James Mannion.

Artwork courtesy of Frances Murray.

Sonically a world away from ‘Hate Love, Make Love’, BLAB turns her hand to the kind of downtempo indie that her Essex mentor Get Cape Wear Cape Fly! has become so masterful at. Eloquent guitars build a realm of isolation and tense questioning of life’s meaning.

Despite the melancholy, BLAB retains her archetypal playfulness:

“I’m buying vegetables trying not to think about getting older / dying alone”

The sardonic morbidity pulls from peak Kate Nash and Morrissey as she details the futility of life in an economy built by boomers, for boomers. Every time the despair threatens to swell beyond repair, BLAB pulls back with a charm and sarcastic couplet to restore a flicker of hope.

The aching pessimism of a generation is laid bare in a fine slice of alt-pop. Coupled with her punk classic ‘Eton Mess’ and the beats-driven angst of ‘Hate Love, Make Love’, Murray is rapidly on her way to becoming one of the voices of her generation.

Blab – Eton Mess

After stealing the show at Get Cape Wear Cape Fly’s Half Moon weekender, Southend’s Blab has been busy writing punk anthems for a new generation in ‘Casual Sex’ and ‘R.I.P’.  She is back once more with the new single ‘Eton Mess’ via Asylums Cool Thing Records.

Featuring the aforementioned mentor Get Cape as producer (and backing vocals), Blab has stepped up the vitriol as she laments the Tories. Sure, whatever, everyone does it, right? Not this well though!

The guitars fire out nastier and dirtier than The Libertines’ ‘Vertigo’ alongside the brutal infectious hooks of The Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers. Like Pete and Carl’s writing style, there’s a lot of heart to the song. However, these are not the heady days of ‘Up The Bracket’. Racism, homophobia, and fatal incompetence are brushed aside as jokes or, if dare questioned, are ridiculed for not being patriotic enough. Blab expertly taps into the rage that far too few of us wake with every day about this government.

With disdain in her heart and a guitar on her shoulder, punk has been reawakened, reimagined and, put her in a class of her own mt lord!

*Image courtesy of Cool Thing Records.