Album Review: Charlie Boyer And The Voyeurs - Clarietta

Clarietta is the first album from Charlie Boyer and The Voyeurs, who, if you read much English music press you might also know as “friends of The Horrors”. It's an endlessly frustrating album; post-punk influenced garage gems fight against the muck of some truly terrible, overlong and boring psych tracks that are helped only marginally by Edwyn Collins' springy production.

The bright side is, in this wonderful digital age you don't have to listen to this record all the way through. So start at the beginning, at the fun (though hideously patronising) Things We Be, which proves they take more than band name inspiration from Richard Hell. There's plenty of nice guitar work, whether it's distorted or left crisp and shiny; the first part of this album holds great textures, and excellent use of a Hammond organ. Lyrically, Boyer treads the same ground that young attractive white men in guitar bands have been slouching over for eternity: “Why do idiot girls go for boys who don't love them as much as I obviously would” (try “'course he loves you with your knees by your ears” for one charming phrase).

Go Blow A Gale is where things start to get dicey, leading into a middle section of songs that are all at least a minute too long, full of boring indecipherable lyrics and heavy-handed plodding psych. Stomping garage punk songs Be A Complete Dream and Be Glamorous offer respite, perfect to end an album that for better or worse is so committed to aesthetics. Closer The Central Ton goes for six-and-a-half minutes, and manages not to stumble on one original idea for its entirety.