COOKING VINYL
If the hallmarks of a good song are lyrics and melodies, you’d be hard pushed to top the latest burst of sunshine from Leith. Delivered in the Reid twins’ endearing Scottish burr, Angry Cyclist covers an impressive amount of ground with humour, indignation and sage wisdom, all served with their trademark poignancy and good cheer. They don’t duck the day’s big topics: the succinct title track, a stomper drenched in strings, warns sternly that if we “give ignorance a chance/ With fascists we will dance”. Then It Comes To Me, a nostalgic, similarly energetic look at how swiftly our lives pass, adds caustically: “I had always laughed at fear of the future/ But then it comes”. Nonetheless, The Battle Of The Booze offers a fiddle-embellished ode to the pleasures and pitfalls of vodka, and there’s a touching, grandiose, stringheavy paean to their home town in Streets Of Edinburgh. The twins have peaked again. Wyndham Wallace