Over two wildly varied and acclaimed EPs, shape-shifting London outfit Famous forged its own inimitable sound. A sound that subverts pop’s Gospels. A barrage of halcyon melodies, despondent electronics jutting against warming acoustics, and scintillating song structure, all the singular creative vision of Jack Merrett — Famous’ singer, lyricist, core songwriter, and only consistent member — that finds convulsively spectacular expression in their debut album, ‘Party Album.’
'Party Album' is the record Famous have been threatening to make for eight years – an album, Merrett intimates, a lot like the band itself: “a long coming-of-age drama that always threatens to end but goes on forever”. Recorded at The Kink’s old studio, Konk, in North London, Party Album’s nine tracks are cohesive in the way the pieces of a broken heart are, woven together by Merrett’s mercurial vocal delivery and elegiac lyrics that find epiphanies within crises and crises within those epiphanies. For him, Merrett tersely suggests, it is simply an album of nine love songs.
Trapped somewhere between an idyllic beauty and an agonising ambition, 'Party Album' is a swamp of pulsating moods that swallow one another whole. “It’s trying," Merrett suggests, "to sketch the pattern of the universal onto a very flawed and partial human life. I think that’s the stupidly audacious thing the whole album is about”. – Robert Davidson
