Male Bonding - Nothing Hurts

Male Bonding's frenetic debut album may not finish the year as the best released by a UK act - Four Tet's There Is Love In You is already taking some beating on that score - but you may struggle to find a more important record to emerge from this side of the Atlantic. Essentially, Nothing Hurts is Britain's rather belated answer to the noise pop of No Age, Abe Vigoda and their fellow Swell dwellers. While fellow Londoners and friends Pens bought a ticket to that dance a year ago - signing to the home of many a Stateside racket-maker De Stijl Records and causing stirrings of excitement in the process - they failed to deliver on their own debut Hey friend, what you doing. Male Bonding don't just come to the table with the heavier-hitting support of Sub Pop but with an album that can live with the best offered up by many a Los Angeles trailblazer in recent years.

And standing out from the noise pop crowd is no mean feat. This is a genre, after all, that routinely produces good bands - the likes of Mika Miko, Times New Viking and the late Jay Reatard - but only occasionally produced an outstanding one. The Dalston three-piece make their pitch for the latter category immediately and with sufficient pace on opener 'Year's Not Long'. What starts off with standard loud, fuzzy and furious guitars - of the highest caliber, we should add - suddenly slows down momentarily towards the two minute mark. It clatters along again British Sea Power-style and then there's that moment of breathing space once more ten seconds later. It's a minor detail but one which makes 'Year's Not Long' Male Bonding's 'Eraser' or 'Teen Creeps'. And we're only one fucking song in!

The one minute and 29 seconds of 'All Things This Way' keeps momentum sky high as do the only marginally less brief but equally direct 'Your Contact' and 'Weird Fillings'. In fact you may not find four stronger opening songs elsewhere this year. That momentum only occasionally dips on nine more tracks and sometimes does so for the better, like on the comparative snails pace of 'Franklin'. And on an album when not one song threatens to breach the three-minute mark, it'd nearly seem wrong to drag this review out any longer, only to say: Noisy America, we've finally caught up.