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First song ‘Cosmic Misery’ is all upbeat guitars “alive” vocals and is perhaps the most upbeat of all the songs here, ascending harmonies building to its natural “yeah, yeah, yeah” conclusion setting the template for the lush melody-bound indie-punk that follows. And while not scared to heavily reference point places and events from their childhood ‘1997, Passing In the Hallway’ opens with the drab couplet “we met when we were seven/ now we’re both in year eleven” but counters this with the slick chorus refrain “I’ve been so anaemic/ since you broke my double helix in my heart”. It’s sweet and sour; picture and frame stuff, as if it was written in year 11 but recorded in sixth form. It’s like the ghosts of me and Vicky Moorhead still haunt the corridors of B Block.
‘Bubble In My Bloodstream’ starts off as relatively dark as this record ever gets before, one third of the singing team, Naomi, jumps in with her bouncing to be heard, super slick, quick-rhyming part and it’s hands-in-pockets, gun-over-shoulder, rolling indie gentry-superb, the type of Joanna Gruesome-with-actual-tunes Fortuna Pop! was made for.
And with the band currently on a Scandinavian jaunt still in support of Courting Strong and two members making up punk-folk local heroes Onsind they are showing no signs of being a flash in the pan either.
The guitar solos on Courting Strong, when they do appear such as on ‘Dust, Juice, Bones and Hair’ and ‘Present, Tense’ are cute as pie-charts while the boy/girl trade-offs continue apace throughout. It’s sooo infectious. Even the commas and brackets in their song titles are all loveably indie and kitsch.
Then when you think you’ve got the perfect pop album on your hands they step it up another level, in fact the final segment of the album is so obviously more mature as though they were learning so quickly from their mistakes as they went and only cementing their DIY record-as-we-write ethos as they wrap up the sessions. The “I know it hurts right now/ but these moments help us grow” key change in the sublime ‘Gin And Listerine’ and repeat refrain “I miss you/ I’m lonely” on ‘1967…’ are oddly grown-up sentiments in the context of the rest of album until I realised that for all the vocal interchanging and cutesy harmonies Courting Strong is really the great coming of age, unrequited love album every self-effacing indie decade needs. She wants to hold hands and he just wants to play at bands; daffodils on Palace Green, jumpers for amps.
But it’s ultimately an optimistic record and by the time closer ‘So Sad (So Sad)’’s false-intro piano collapses into one final pop-punk, Weezer meets the Buzzcocks, hurrah. It’s meatier than most of the rest of the album perhaps giving away some heavier influences but that camp chorus is Martha in a nutshell and a fitting ending to a tremendous debut.
The Fat Angel Sings 