The Dawn Parade : The Underground
(Sugartown)

The Underground, the latest single from Cambridge's epic pop heroes The Dawn Parade, is a slab of beautiful, sweeping pop music which wants to pick you up off the floor, soothe the ache and guide you home. Speaking of longing and determined innocence, of the hurt and the promise of continuing to hope despite it all, The Underground calls for the listener to throw in their lot with daydreams, with the vague but seductive call of Something More behind the day to day.

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This single is a tribute to low-rent beauty and gutter romance on a shoestring budget, to drunken foolishness and erratic coping mechanisms.
It's the urge to blow the rent on another night out and the promise it might hold, and the satisfaction of knowing that even if that promise didn't manifest itself, at least you know you weren't sitting at home wondering whether it might have. It gives voice to the difficulty of keeping your mind open enough to see beauty when life shoves it in front of you, and to the
frustration and desperation of knowing the answer must be somewhere nearby and feeling that you can almost see the truth disappearing around the next
corner. It embodies both hope and disappointment; both the searing fire of longing and the howling ache that is that fire's flipside. The Dawn Parade
sing with a bright clarity of treading the line between the stubborn pull of the familiar and the longing for a new, transcendent salvation. Emptiness and craving; hope and belief; frantically running "From falling star to falling star" to a widescreen soundtrack of chiming guitars, big drums and the soft, aching spaces between the sounds.

This is a wide-eyed, honest and heartfelt homage to hope, belief and a deeper truth - a homage which doesn't sink to the level of cliché and leave the sour aftertaste of aspartame on the palate. For all those hopeless romantics who are determined never to let go of their daydreams and who cling to their unrealistic expectations of life, who know that the serial disappointment of continuing to hope will always be better than giving in to the greyness of accepting their lot, The Dawn Parade are a clarion call to arms.

Holl(i)y

 

Now here's an alternative view from the pen of Anna Claxton

THE DAWN PARADE- The Underground

It doesn't really matter what I write here because this is a band which has been endorsed by the late John Peel and Rolling Stone magazine to name but a few, not to mention our very own Debbie Davies being counted among the many avid fans which sell out shows here, there and everywhere. I hadn't heard them until now, being something more than an indie follower these days, and not one to generally pay attention to hype of any kind. Although I want to believe. I really do.
But I am harder to please than most and, through no amount of trying to totally enjoy every second of this three-track offering, after several listens I have to admit that I am, unfortunately, unconvinced. Because this is a release which, to me, screams out "haven't I heard this before?". Anthemic passion: check; meaningful and working-class lyrical content that no rebellious adolescent will be able to ignore: check; slightly Manic Street Preacher-inspired melodious rock, check, check and check. It's not great either that the singer sounds like a parody of Bob Geldof meets Mark from The Levellers meets another drunken-sounding singer I can't place right now.
Still, perhaps it also doesn't help that I am possibly the only person in Cambridge not to have seen The Dawn Parade live and perhaps if I do then I would understand and appreciate them a little more. Until then, they will remain something of a musical cliché.