Let’s deal with the lineage first, because Law and his band certainly do. The press notes cite the Strokes, Green Day and Radiohead as touchstones, and you can hear the join marks if you listen closely enough: Kian Carrol’s lead guitar lines have that loose-wristed, faintly bored Casablancas swagger, Taylor Whyte’s drums keep things moving with a punk-pop urgency that owes a debt to Tr\u00e9 Cool, and somewhere underneath it all there’s a wash of melancholy that wants very badly to be Thom Yorke before remembering it’s actually a hook-laden indie single with a chorus built for shouting back at a sweaty Glasgow basement gig. It’s a slightly odd marriage of influences \u2014 the unpretentious thump of pop-punk wedded to the studied art-rock unease of Radiohead \u2014 but credit to the band, Morgan Flannigan’s basslines and Alexander Duncan-Gibson’s rhythm guitar do a fair job of stitching it together rather than letting it fall into pastiche.<\/p>
Thematically, this is where the record earns its keep. The press release frames the song as an exploration of “how humans constantly seek meaning and connection in everything around them,” and questioning our tendency to make things “about us” \u2014 heady stuff for a first outing, and the kind of philosophical reach that could easily collapse under its own self-importance. It mostly doesn’t. There’s a wry self-awareness sitting underneath the lyric, an acknowledgement that even the song interrogating our need for meaning is itself an act of meaning-making, a “made up construct” examining made-up constructs. It’s the sort of conceit that the Talking Heads might have winked at, and to Law’s credit he doesn’t oversell it; the chorus is catchy enough that you could miss the philosophy entirely and just enjoy shouting along, which is, frankly, the correct way to consume a debut single.<\/span><\/p> That this was recorded as the first full-band session at Riverside Music College gives the track a slightly raw, in-the-room quality \u2014 not polished to a shine, but not amateurish either. There’s an energy here that suggests live performance is where this band actually lives, and the recent run through Glasgow stalwarts the Classic Grand and Ivory Blacks bears that out. This is a band road-testing songs in front of people who’ll tell them honestly if a bridge drags, and “Made Up Construct” has clearly benefited from that kind of scrutiny.<\/span><\/p> Is it a masterpiece? No \u2014 and it would be faintly embarrassing if a band’s first true recording were. But it’s a confident, hook-driven statement of intent from a group that knows exactly which records they grew up loving and isn’t shy about saying so. Matt Law won’t reinvent alternative rock with this one. He might, however, make you want to find out what he does next.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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