REGRESSIVE LEFT - THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY
Credit: Luis Kramer
Straight out of Luton, Regressive Left are a three-piece dance-pop band with something to say. The Wrong Side OF History is the band's first EP after playing in different bands or djing around London. The band came together sometime over the global pandemic lockdowns and decided to form a band, a bouncy, funny, and musically complex version of dance rock with a political message.
You could be forgiven for maybe tuning out of the intro to the band’s first and eponymous track ‘The Wrong Side of History’. What starts as a relatively thin and surprisingly demure dance beat with some vocals straight out of a “How to sound like James Murphy” handbook eventually booms into a fantastically bombastic and danceable track that practically forces you to get out of your seat and onto the dancefloor.
In the past decade or so there’s been a lot of talk of newer bands ‘copying’ already successful bands in order to piggyback on a wave of support and money, with many ending in court cases. A case could be made for the similarity of Regressive Left and LCD Soundsystem, with both band's musical styles being the same and some Regressive Left songs even sounding uncannily similar to some LCD tracks. However, there is such a thing as inspiration. It’s clear to anyone who is a fan of LCD Soundsystem, or even DFA Records, what music very clearly inspired Regressive Left for this EP.
Being able to discern the sonic inheritance of a band doesn’t make the music they create bad. This is a great EP by a band that will clearly go on to create an even stronger next project, one that I can quite easily see being very successful and drawing tons of new fans.
That being said, ‘Bad Faith’ just sounds a bit too much like LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Drunk Girls’ or ‘One Touch’ at times, in such a capacity that it was sometimes all I could think about when listening to it. What Regressive Left do to the genre of dance rock is emphasise the actual instruments being played. The performances are really great on this track and the production is top-notch. There are great flourishes throughout with just enough emphasis on good songwriting to keep the band in check, rather than getting lost in a groove for ten minutes like some of their contemporaries in the genre. The lyrics can at times feel somewhat smarmy. The repeated phrase “Je sais bien, mais quand meme,” taken from French psychoanalyst Octave Manonni, taken in a certain way, can come off as a bit snobby.
The lyrics throughout this EP can be a bit jarring. Granted, the band knows what they’re doing, and there are some brilliant lines. For example “everyone and their mothers are trying to cancel me” on the title track, followed by “I only talk about free speech when it concerns my freedom to be a dick” are brilliantly funny lines that I imagine plenty of fans will love yelling back at the band as they continue to play bigger venues to bigger crowds. For me though, directly quoting Stewart Lee, while funny and on-brand, was a bit cringe-inducing.
Adam Blackwell
★★★★☆