Posted on December 28, 2008 - by Halina Rifai

The Jane Bradfords Strategy

I admire artists that create upbeat music that contains melancholy lyrics. It is like an actor of sorts, you put on a gloriously happy front to your public but inside the sadness washes your insides like sandcastles at shore. Deci Gallen, front man and founder is somewhat qualified at threading this through every needle of eye of these songs. I say so often that which we cannot express vocally is so much easier through song and lyric.

When I first heard ‘Golden Ticket’ by The Jane Bradfords I was ecstatic, I could not believe something that I associated so profoundly with my childhood had made an appearance in a song by a respectable artist. The song is so full of love it is bursting at the seams. A love song in its truest form however, not one you immediately come to recognise as initially its beats kidnap your thoughts until you gain hold of yourself to realise what the lyrics are saying. A song about losing and loving and coming back to the unquestionable sentiment you know. ‘You got a golden ticket and you won my heart’, have you ever had that smile on your face when you remember something so extraordinarily special, something that makes your dimple filled cheeks lift and your remembering eyes gaze out of you window with fondness. Those lyrics do that for me.

Strategy 2 (Fight Them All), with its repetitive intro and defiant lyric suddenly appears a burst of uppercut. ‘You gotta fight them all’, one of those tracks that comes at an opportune time. When I say opportune time it is almost as if you have pushed something to the back of your mind, something you do not want to deal with and this song brings it forward, it makes you want to deal with the rigmarole, trash and blather of it and obliterate it.

Fight Them All

Another stand out track on this album of solace is ‘The Evening Angels Gather Here’. Deci has a vocal that really digs to the core, he does not just sing a song he really grabs everything he has and sings it as if it his last time and conversely the first. A consummate ending to this album, it is an apology but one that really does beg for forgiveness. Sometimes you wonder if apologies like this will ever see the light of day, will they remedy what has been done? I hope so. Sometimes you do not need a response to things you ask for, you just want the recognition that it has been listened to, you want it to inspire the ventricles of that one person you meant it for. Silence after all is the breaking of ones heart.

I urge you all to listen to this album; it is one that catapults not only Belfast to the modern age but also thrusts our definitions and interpretations of love to a place that we do not feel ridiculous. It is no longer pitiful to express oneself like this; it is merely a start as to how we should be expressing it. Electronica, ironically dropped its 10 01 and grew AB+.

www.myspace.com/thejanebradfords

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