Young Giant

If it didn't state so boldly in the band's press material that frontman Dan Eaton and drummer Jake Ryan logged time in noisecore act the Chariot, you would likely never put those two bands together from the sound of Queens Club's full-length debut. It has a similar energy and drive, sure, but of a sort that you would sooner find in the variety of British pop groups that this Missouri-based quartet quite baldly references.



There's an Editors-style spin to the dreamy "Dust," a pulsing but lightweight take of Arctic Monkeys' cheeky pop on album opening "Are We? Will We?" and a bit of Franz Ferdinand's disco charge found in the deliriously romantic "Lydia" (a song that also manages to include, of all things, a bit of a Brazilian percussion breakdown).



What outs the band as a purely American outfit is the relentless enthusiasm that permeates Young Giant. They try to counteract with the critical bon mots found in the bold-faced track "I'm American" ("I fight for your rights/I wear a fancy tie/I'm only working for/You middle-class Americans/I'm controversial/See the commercial"). But that song is surrounded by the kind of fist pumping sing-alongs and open-armed appeals that even the nicest of the British outfits that Queens Club reference wouldn't be caught dead spouting.

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