Heavenly – Highway To Heavenly (Skep Wax) (13th Floor Album Review)
After a 30 year hiatus, British band Heavenly have cut their 5th long player Highway To Heavenly, a return to the ‘Jangle’ and Indie Pop genre of the late 1980s and early 90s that featured a number of similar groups – Heavenly precursor Talulah Gosh, The Field Mice, The Orchids and others – first described by the UK music bible NME on their CD giveaway C86.
Heavenly were known for their jangly guitar, pumping rhythm, emblematic keyboards and lyrics that ranged from relationship wobbles to darker subjects allied to feminism, identity politics and social issues delivered with innocent, almost naive-sounding, sweet harmonies.
The result was danceable tunes with a twee, simplistic air, but with undertones of punk sensibilities and interesting chord progressions devloping into new spinoff genres, notably the Riot Grrl music of the mid-1990s.
This album will be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s listened to earlier Heavenly’s releases: there’s the same hip-wiggling basslines, toe-tapping drums, sixties-infused keyboards, jingle-jangle guitars and that infectious, sweetly swooning vocals. The band are a little older with original singers Amelia Fletcher (guitar) and Cathy Rogers (keyboard) still sporting short, pixie-style hairdos with guitarist Peter Momtchiloff and Rob Pursey on bass joined by Ian Button the replacement member on drums for former drummer Mathew Fletcher who died in 1996 precipitating the group’s break-up shortly after.
The death of Fletcher is dealt with in the final track of this 11 song LP, That Last Day. It’s a song of two halves – a recounting of one of the last moments shared by Amelia Fletcher with her brother Mathew that left the former mortified as the latter lay laughing on a church floor after falling from his wheelchair with the second half dedicated to remembrance, from the service to the memories that last and linger after a loved one is gone. Musically the song is bare, almost naked, with the accent on the lyrics, the guitar leading the way over the first half as other instruments gradually join to the halfway point and the repeated line – And we left you all alone – sounding like a scratched record refrain. It’s a moving eulogy from Amelia to her brother that sits outside the happier, more hopeful sounds found on the rest of the album and a perfect way to close out.
But that’s for the end.
From the moment the music starts the listener is taken on a ride through conflicting emotions – the music is upbeat and happy, but, sometimes, the words will hit a raw nerve.
On opener Scene Stealing, the contrasting worlds of social media influencers and their innocent abused victims is addressed over the backdrop of a jaunty, joyful jumparound. Lily Allen is brought to mind, although this band predates the English feminist icon by at least a decade.
Portland Town brings an edgier feel but the message is kinder, a celebration of finding a place where diversity is embraced and judgement is set aside for another time and place – I don’t have to be where people love me, They don’t have to care where I’ve been, I just want to be where no one stares at me, I just want to feel I fit in.
Entitled tech bros empowered by wealth and inflated egos are ripped in Press Return – You gave no thought to, All the mess that you’d leave in your tracks, The hearts that you’d be breaking, And the lives that you would crack – no one is safe from Fletcher’s gaze and searing assessment.
In just three songs we’ve been given a glimpse of what drives this band and Amelia Fletcher’s writing.
Yet, elsewhere, we’re treated to awkward teenage love on Excuse Me, about falling in love with the nerdiest boy in school. The lyrics are funny and touching at the same time – Could you have been, Less cool? Your glasses slipping down, You were the one, At school who never went to town, Last to picked, For teams but never losing face, You were the one, For me, my funny kind of taste. It’s imbued with the joyful hope of youth, the energy of butterflies in the stomach and carefree attitudes. Until the last lines – We never realised that, What we had would be the best it got, Now it is gone,
Messed up again!
In another, A Different Beat, a relationship doomed from the start necessitates an escape from abuse and the freedom of a symbolic life of dance and disco – She remembers when, She still saw her friends, Could she ever, she ever, she ever
She ever feel brave enough to just go?. The thumping bass is redolent of another Brit Pop favourite, Blur, with lines that could easily come from the master of wry, sardonic real life commentary, Jarvis Cocker. He could easily sing that hopeful last line – Now she’s out on the dance floor , Can’t recall what came before, But she knows she’ll, Never have to go there anymore. Fletcher and Rogers combine beautifully on this number, weaving their sugar-coated voices over and through each other as the songs fades out.
There are gems all through this record. And while it might seem like a nostalgic trip down memory lane and, perhaps, a cynical attempt to cash in on a late-career rekindling thanks to social media, the songs are heartfelt, well-written and delivered with an exceptional amount of verve that adds a little sprinkle to some truly depressing subjects.
And you gotta love that AC/DC reference in the album title!
Alex Robertson
Highway To Heavenly is out now via Skep Wax Records
