Cardinal Jack are a trio of musicians from London who met while at university. And this, their debut album, is released on the University of Herfordshire's own record label UHRecordings. A University with a record label! Sounds like a great idea to me. There should be more of them on hand to give fledgling bands a helping hand.

The band cite their influences as The Smiths, The Mars Volta, The Beatles and The Police and, like all good influences should be, they are absorbed into the whole with the band not sounding much like any of them except for perhaps The Smiths. But even then it's only the very broad Indie sound of the band that puts them in that bracket. On the whole they're a lot more energetic than The Smiths. It's a spiky charged energy that places them closer to Kaiser Chiefs.

Tom Williamson handles guitar and main vocal duties and his clean high ranging vocals and idiosyncratic guitar playing remind me of many things: The Knack, The Teardrop Explodes and overridingly XTC. Tom is backed by the tight rhythm section of Paul Eaton on bass and vocals and Mark Kempson on drums and vocals. They're a tight bunch all told.

This is an accomplished debut. The songs are catchy without being overly commercial by today's standards. And I think that's refreshing. They sound like a band comfortable with who they are and what they're doing. They certainly don't sound as if they're trying to fit in with current trends. And that just might turn out to be their strength. I think that they really have managed to bottle some of that early British post-punk / new wave sound. The music is never especially pretty, simple or straight. But it is driven by classic Jam-like driven bass lines surrounded by sometimes spacious and epic guitar textures and, at times, quick chopping triads.

And again this isn't new wave as revisited by the likes of The Strokes or Franz Ferdinand. This is something altogether different. I think that Cardinal Jack have locked into another vein of new wave that I haven't heard in quite a while.

http://www.cardinaljack.com/