Grandstanding

Piloted by singer-songsmith Steve Robinson, The Laundry Shop are two Irish lads and a Swedish girl. They’re already known to anyone with a TV set through the use of their celebratory ‘Highs And Lows’ on the Discover Ireland campaign. In essence they make a small bag of tricks go a mighty long way. That bag includes exquisitely breathy Crosby, Nash and Garfunkel harmonies, and they regularly explode from pindrop quiet into clobbering slabs of guitar chords, evoking Therapy? and Nirvana et al so often it becomes not funny by the time you get to track nine ‘The Fairy Lake’.
But they also have some elegantly classy songs that give this debut an extra dimension. ‘Terrified’ is one of them, using all of the aforementioned tricks to magnificent effect and adding a massive melody to boot. ‘There Is A Time’ has a breathless urgency that buoys it up, plus infectious riffs and great vocals. The swaggering title-track is full on guitar-rock, with the ghosts of the Foo Fighters hovering nearby, and ‘High And Lows’ is better heard here rather that in TV byte format. Unfortunately, ‘The Daily Special’ is a slo-mo ballad so treacly you can imagine it being covered by Westlife or Robbie, but the breezy ‘Brighten The Ways’ actually benefits from being less polished.
Grandstanding suffers from being assembled from a palette limited mainly to voice, guitar and drums, but it also has a cohesiveness that makes it work as a total music experience far greater than the sum of its ingredients.

Key Track: 'Terrified'