Around the Blocks – Giant Killers (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Around the Blocks feels like the sort of song that only a British band could have written. I don’t mean that in any detrimental way to our colonial brothers and sisters across the Atlantic (or any other country, for that matter), but there is a sense here of the small-town experience captured in a charming and unassuming way. It feels wonderfully small and brilliantly parochial, deprecating, and recalled with precision and accuracy.

Of course, artists from all countries write about their formative years in the back of beyond, those liminal places in the suburbs or those small towns that are neither rural nor urban, the overlooked and the ordinary. But in an American hand, for example, the story would seem more significant, more romantic, more ambitious, and dynamic, and that, I feel, is contrary to the point that Giant Killers is making here.

They further drive the point gently home with the rhythmic jangles that the song ebbs and flows on, neither explosive nor understated, just like the lives of those they seek to capture in it.

The single comes with two great additional tracks, Normal Service (Will Not Be Resumed), more small-town tales, and kitchen sink dramas, this time perhaps darker, delivered in hushed tones and gently anthemic in the choruses…if gently anthemic is even a thing.

The other is a live rendition of Fighting In The High Street from 1996 at The Louisiana, a venue that I know well. This song highlights the band’s poetic prowess, with lyrics reminding me of Del Amitri and the delivery of The Liberty Horses, both bands that I don’t use as reference points lightly. Such is the benchmark of this song.

Such is Giant Killers’ grasp of putting the small-town lives of youngsters into a song that I would be surprised if Shane Meadows or maybe even Ken Loach is on the phone soon, asking them to score their next film project.