The current cult status of the Windmill—the famed South London venue/indie-rock incubator/rite of passage—cannot be overstated. After the breakthrough success of bands like black midi and Black Country, New Road, playing the Windmill has become an important checkpoint for young British post-punk outfits like Man/Woman/Chainsaw. But on their debut album, Cannonball, the six-piece don’t invoke the jagged, now-familiar experimentation that first made the Windmill famous. Instead, they tread a knife’s edge between post-punk and impassioned pop, balancing stretches of dry, studied intensity with moments of impressive musicianship.
Even as they distance themselves from the Windmill set, they still harbor strands of its DNA: Their five original members attended the BRIT School in Croydon (the free-to-attend arts school that black midi also attended), and, after gigging around London, they came to my attention through a 2023 video by Lou Smith, the Windmill’s unofficial videographer. The playing is grandiose and confident, noisy and messy. Guitarists Billy Ward and Billy Doyle lay down power chords and questionably executed technical riffs, while Vera Leppänen’s wandering basslines, Emmie-Mae Avery’s keyboards, Clio Starwood’s violin, and Lola Cherry’s motorik drum beats complete the lineup.
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Listen to the klezmer-y semitone movements and landfill sprechgesang of “Any Given Sunday” next to Black Country, New Road’s still-singular For the first time, and you’ll hear how much the band’s early material owed to their contemporaries. But the band’s strongest tracks, like the twinkly “Ode to Clio,” hinted at poppier territory. Cannonball’s songwriting follows these impulses, and its balladic melodies and themes of fractured romance and jealousy run spiritedly through the album.
The band is at their best when they explore the tension between their melodramatic subject matter and the textural richness of their many instrumentalists. On opener “Only Girl,” the lyrics hint at an intense yet slightly anxious relationship, and the band responds, as if everyone’s a friend giving Leppänen advice. Avery’s piano bobs around excitedly in the verses; Doyle and Ward’s serpentine guitar and Starwood’s swirling violin melody are warnings that the protagonist might be slightly too obsessed.
The inconsistencies in sound across tracks can sometimes feel like Man/Woman/Chainsaw testing out new terrain simply to prove themselves. The drawn-out, Nick Cave pastiche of “Goddamn, Lizard Man!” uses the violin and piano more like supplementary measures, which takes away from the music’s idiosyncrasies. It’s a far cry from the album’s best track, “Nosedive,” the climactic wedding of their pop aesthetics and detailed instrumental writing. The song is based on tiny amounts of melodic material that repeat over an unchanging bassline—a glassy guitar figure, a billowing synth chord, a violin glissando, and, eventually, a surging mantra with interlocking vocals. The band gives each other the necessary space to unfurl into something ornate, making use of their size, which is its emotional core and its strength. It’s a fantastic burden to figure out how to be a successful touring band at such a young age, to make music that is sustainable while finding new ways to experiment. Cannonball is a good start.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
