Scottish rock band THE FRATELLIS announce headline Belfast show at the Limelight 1 in December

Scottish rock band THE FRATELLIS announce headline Belfast show at the Limelight 1 in December

Scottish rock band The Fratellis are pleased to announce a headline Belfast show at the Limelight 1 on Tuesday, December 04th 2018. The band released their fifth studio album ‘In Your Own Sweet Time’ in March of this year.

The Fratellis are back with their fifth album In Your Own Sweet Time and once again they team up with six-time Grammy and Mercury-nominated American producer Tony Hoffer (Beck, The Kooks, M83, Belle & Sebastian). Hoffer previously collaborated on smash-hit Costello Music, an album that lasted 83 weeks in the charts, won The Fratellis a Brit Award in 2007 for ‘Best Emerging Artists’ and launched The Fratellis to stratospheric critical and commercial heights. Four albums and innumerable world tours later, and The Fratellis still sell-out shows from China (where the band played this summer) to Russia (a hotspot on the tour prior to 2015’s Eyes Wide, Tongue Tied) through to heartland America.

However The Fratellis are a band that refuses to rest on their laurels, and In Your Own Sweet Time marks a development into a thrillingly chameleonic new phase, identified by a daring new sound that is bigger, bolder, and yet still shot through with a whip-smart, pitch-black sense of humour we have come to expect from the irrepressible Glaswegian trio. Listeners can expect their first tantalising taste of what’s in store with first single Stand Up Tragedy released 1st December. Showcasing vibrant lyrical dexterity and foot-tapping, spine-tingling rhythms, both tracks tease the glittering, adrenaline-charged vibes coursing through In Your Own Sweet Time.

Long-time fans of the band will be excited to find at its centre a series of banging, stadium-filling tracks like I’ve Been Blind, which teases synthy 80s vibes before erupting into a raucous invitation to follow the band down the rabbit hole into a world of “lies” and “disguises”. Similarly, with Laughing Gas it’s hard not to imagine the crowd singing and dancing along to the soaring guitar riffs and manic drum-work that accompany a joyous drifting between major and minor shifts. Jon Fratelli characterises these tracks as an internal conversation; a reminder “not to take life too seriously.”

In Your Own Sweet Time certainly delivers on its own promise of ecstatic, almost absurdist fun. Offered as an instant gratification track with pre-orders of the album, The Next Time We Wed is a hyperactive slice of mischief matching the Fratellis’ characteristic impish theatricality and wit with ricocheting Prince-like guitar riffs. “It feels like a good representation of the record,” observes Jon, and you can hear the Prince influence in particular as a new-found falsetto bleeds into the Fratelli’s bag of tricks, firing through Told You So, and the entertaining bathos of Romeo & Juliet riff Starcrossed Losers. A steadfast determination to have fun runs through the core of the album, from the intricate word-play and rhyme we’ve come to expect from The Fratellis, through to more unexpected surprises like a rude saxophone elbowing its way into Indestructible.

No one seems more surprised with the direction In Your Own Sweet Time took than Jon himself, who admits that “the whole record was far more spontaneous than I’ve ever been before,” and you can hear the band’s front-man reveling in a puckish adopting of roles and personas as we fly through tracks, twisting and turning his voice to its limits. The badly behaved husband beaten “black and blue” in the cheeky The Next Time We Wed morphs seamlessly into the new-age guru of the album’s surprisingly psychedelic trips. This virtuosic game of mimicry reaches its joyous apex with the swinging, candy-sweet Roy Orbison pastiche of Sugartown, where Jon plays both the warbling balladeer and his loyal backup singers. Populated with saccharine imagery straight out of a 50s ad campaign, Sugartown delights in its own theatricality, even while an insistent drumbeat and loopy guitars threaten to shatter the illusion.

In Your Own Sweet Time rockets at such a pace that it is almost hard to focus on each little surrealist tableau as they strobe past, but Jon Fratelli warns against some grand interpretation, declaring that “nothing can be taken at face value.” Gonzo imagery is piled precariously on top of itself with the band always staying one-step ahead of the game as they drift with postmodern élan through genres whose boundaries become porous in their hands. The cryptically titled Advaita Shuffle references the Hindu philosophy that attempts to place the soul amongst different planes of reality, and Jon and the boys translate this musically into a track that opens with eastern influences before giving way to frantic banjo pluckings, while the refrain of “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes” reverberates throughout – a childhood memory turned dirty-joke. Things come to a head with the titanic seven-minute epic I Am That which collapses the album into a wall of sound incorporating jet engine blasts into an overwhelming expression of pure, cathartic, musical release.

In these dark and uncertain times, sometimes all you need is to lose yourself in the moment, In Your Own Sweet Time demands you stop trying to make sense, take off your shoes, and dance. Boasting all the sweaty, joyful energy of 1970s American pop, combined with the testosterone-fuelled virtuosity of the best British rock, In Your Own Sweet Time is a shot of pure, uninhibited, pleasure. Let Jon Fratelli (vox, guitar), Barry Fratelli (Bass), and Mince Fratelli (drums) hold your hand and guide you through the chaos.

Limelight 1, Belfast
Tuesday, December 4th, 2018
Doors 7 pm *EARLY SHOW*
Tickets £20 + Booking Fee
18+ Only

Tickets on sale Friday @ 10 am from www.limelightbelfast.com, www.shine.netKaty’s Bar & Ticketmaster outlets nationwide. Northern Ireland customers 0844 277 44 55 & Republic of Ireland customers 0818 719 300.

Xsnoize Author
Mark Millar is the founder of XS Noize and looks after the daily running of the website as well as hosting interviews for the weekly XS Noize Podcast. Mark's favourite album is Achtung Baby by U2.

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