Album Review: Skiving – The Family Computer

Seven is a lucky number for Londoner’s Skiving, as each track on The Family Computer is, for want of a better phrase, a belter.

Right out of the gates, Ich Bin Ein Beginner is a statement of intent. Skiving are taking us on a musical joyride, arch pop, high jinks, and low blows ready to trip up the over-confident or the unwary.

Before you have a chance to catch your breath, The National Lottery comes at you like a bullet, a Play for Today overflowing with detail but no sense of joy in the end. Well, maybe the false end, because as the initial narrative of the lyrics comes to a sudden halt, leaving the vocalist sounding deflated, a mania builds, as if an unwillingness to face reality sends us on a spiral to…

…the following track, Last Man In Space. I don’t know if there is a relationship between the two songs, but from avoidance of reality to isolation from it, it does come across as if there is a connection. That is enhanced by the Art Brut meets Young Knives angular groove of the arrangement in both.

From there, you’re led to the everyday minutiae of Disaster Films, dull details switching out for religious imagery as the song shifts and slides from indie to Roxy Music and jazzy sax motifs. It’s inventive, unpredictable, as if becoming a homemade suspense movie. It’s also the track where the primal Bowie/Joe Talbot tones of the vocals are fully let loose.  

Things Made Of Metal continues that everyday revulsion of the mundane, a diary of a commuting nobody that explodes into a firestorm of impotent rage. The lyrics become uncomfortable, as if witnessing a descent into madness, but one driven by the tedium of existence, a haircut enough to trigger the worst excess.

I can’t quite get my head around I’m Starting To Think This Isn’t A Benjamin Button Situation as a song title, mainly as I’ve never seen the film. (Thank you, Wikipedia!) But the song is fierce and uncompromising, if not quite threatening, in how, once again, Skiving make the ordinary details of suburban living seem full of fear.

Finishing off the slow, sax-filled fractured waltz of Conversations With David Berman (Was That Civilised?), art-rock is repurposed into a cry for… what exactly? And maybe that’s the point. We cry out, rage away, but for what?

The Family Computer is a clever album, themes reappearing in the lyrics and instrumentation, repetition adding to the horror of the ordinary, of possibly the fear of realising we might like to imagine ourselves as a sad sack anti-hero like Homer Simpson, but to hark back to the lyrics we’re really the repressed Helen Lovejoy; parcelling out joy and misery, one drop at a time.   

The Family Computer is streaming on Bandcamp and Spotify, with the band holding an album launch party at The Windmill in Brixton on the 11th of February – head to the band’s Instagram feed for more info.