The Night Café - 0151
An album five years in the making, The Night Café’s promising debut ‘0151’ will be released unto the universe when they take on a slot at Reading and Leeds Festival. It is by no means their first time playing the festival, but will undoubtedly be the most significant performance of their careers.
After listening to the album a couple of times, the move feels very intentional. The band’s no-nonsense commentary on loneliness, relationships and self doubt soundtracked by melodic guitars and a teaspoon of grit is the exact soundscape sought out by so many young people at a setting such as Reading and Leeds. Despite a following strong enough to constitute a huge headline tour later this year, there is no better place to garner the attention of guitar hungry festival goers. It can be said with a relative degree of certainty that tracks such as Felicity and I’m Fine were made for this purpose.
Buzzy and energetic EP cut Mixed Signals garnered a significant amount of online buzz in 2017, with over 5 million Spotify plays to date. Current fans will be relieved to see a reworked, cleaner sounding version appears as 0151’s penultimate song, without sacrificing the original version’s youthful rapturerousness. Touring with The Wombats and Circa Waves - two of the biggest bands to come out of their hometown in the last decade - has evidently helped in growing the depth of their output. Interlude Take Care pt.1 is equally evidence of this, with the band embracing a soothing change of tone and pace that chooses to be interesting rather than self indulgent.
As far as singles are concerned, Turn shines as a sucker punch of an album highlight. Lead singer Sean Martin belts over music that is The Night Café with dynamism at its core. This aside, the other songs put out prior to the album definitely stand out as the most memorable. While some may argue that this is the point of a good single, the quantity feels excessive - it’s a shame to receive a third the album’s best cuts before its release. While commonplace for the industry at present, drip feeding a handful of the album’s strongest tracks in the months leading up to the release isn’t always advisable. This is more prevalent with an album like 0151, standing at a lengthy 17 tracks in total. It takes further inspection to really separate the great from the mediocre outside of the lead singles, and would make for a sharper, more engaging listen if condensed.
0151 is an album with strong amounts of youth and promise. If The Night Café have started as they mean to go on there is the potential for an exciting future in indie music.
7/10
