Hands up then anyone who was tempted into pigeon-holing The Chalets the first time they clapped eyes on them?
Hair-clips, drainpipe kecks, regulation bed-heads, ra-ra skirts, and a penchant for day-glo accessories: given their choice of battle gear, the Dub five piece couldn’t have trumpeted their schmindeyness any louder if they played recorders and spent their time on stage between songs blowing soap bubbles and sucking on lollipops.
But guess what? Despite their absolute and very obvious submergence in the minutiae and ephemerae of the indie milieu, The Chalets Check In soon reveals itself as the work of expert fifth columnists.
Make no mistake about it: while this record sounds raucous and celebratory, when it comes to the kind of low-rent disappointments, passive-aggressive jealousies and humbling romantic failures from which it draws its inspiration, it has the cold, scalpel-sharp eye of a surgeon.
The opening track, ‘Theme From Chalets’, provides a handy outline of the record’s recurring subject matter. The girls and boys play call and response, unfolding a tale of thwarted, all-back-to-mine seduction that, on initial contact seems merely knock-about (“I’m really sorry, they looked good in the dark/Yours is a howler, she looks like she could bark.”), but which gradually unfolds to take on a much darker, pathos-filled character.
Likewise, ‘Two Chord Song’, in which a pair of patent losers hook up with two glamour pusses and become a particularly tooth-rotting flavour of the month
(“We were on the news and they said if it was the 80s/Then we would have been on The Tube”), only for the dream to die when the girls become disenchanted with the tawdry reality of life on the indie treadmill (“We’ve got some weird looking groupies hanging around our room/We wanna leave the band and we wanna go soon.”). The closing refrain is a gleeful: “You’ll never hear us again.”
The crisp, thrilling thrust of the music, meanwhile, is a revelation. Powerful throughout and thankfully kitsch-free, it’s tight, light-on-its-feet and, depending on the occasion, happy to reference everything from the B52s and The Strokes to The Undertones and (shucks) Nirvana. One wonders if the presence of Richard ‘North Antrim’ Rainey behind the desk has helped to ensure that Check In always maintains its edge. On ‘Fight Your Kids’, they even manage to get funky.
Of course, given the label it’s on, we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that this is such a smart, of-its-time record (and Check In will sit comfortably alongside the likes of Promenade and I Am The Greatest), but it still comes as a pleasant shock to find out that something which, on first encounter, looked sickeningly sweet, once chewed turns out, in fact, to be deliciously sour.