Endearing indie outfits announcing that they’re going pop is rarely cause for celebration. The sense that they feel strong-armed into it by commercial pressures is generally in inverse proportion to their ability to pull it off. But the Big Moon have actually done it, after a fashion. Since earning a Mercury nomination for their chipper, grungy 2017 debut album, Love in the 4th Dimension, the London four-piece haven’t copied some of their peers’ vain attempts to pay homage to teenage Destiny’s Child obsessions, or to replicate Max Martin’s studio arsenal in their bedrooms. Walking Like We Do vaults back a few more pop generations to the brassy bonhomie, dry wit and shabby music hall charm of acts such as Dexys, or even Elton John at his brightest.
Their piano galumphs along, their vocal harmonies are rowdy and imposing yet their quirks are tamed by keen, oddball structures, and a rare balance of enveloping dreaminess and emphatic insistence. At their spikiest, as on Don’t Think or Holy Roller, they can recall the great 2000s indie band the Long Blondes. But there’s nothing kitsch about the Big Moon’s bright and inviting second record – its singles have, pleasingly, found a surprising home on Radio 1, and songwriter and frontwoman Juliette Jackson is a real laureate of how underwhelming contemporary womanhood can feel.
She’s a fantastic lyricist, endlessly quotable and often subtly devastating without self-pity or the jarring rawness that characterises comparable US songwriters. “I never saw the tide coming, I only saw the waves,” she sings about an unforeseen breakup on Waves, a wonderfully orderly song that reflects Jackson’s self-delusions. “You had me going for a minute there,” she sings to a deserting paramour, growing more ragged as she realises they’ve actually gone. She mourns her friends on the bittersweet Barcelona, the ones moving away, becoming successful, pursuing grownup lives: “I may be present, but I’m not all here,” she sings of one such funeral for youth. “I’m looking at her baby, picking out her features.” Jackson is empathetic and spirited as she sings about her fears of being left behind. But the Big Moon’s sharp update ensures they won’t be.
