Absentee / Victory Shorts

Memphis Industries

Born to the sounds of Barry Manilow and The Carpenters, raised on romantic comedies, and schooled in failed love and misfiring lust, Absentee emerges well-versed in the rigors of romance with their finest album to date, Victory Shorts.  Finding a seat between unreachable romanticism and hopeless realism, Victory Shorts offers lush mini romantic tragedies for those who thought Casablanca ended a little too abruptly. Opener "Shared" sets the scene with a couple pleased as punch that they found each other, until things take a darker turn with Absentee smashing their way through "Boy, Did She Teach You Nothing," latest EP title-track "Bitchstealer," and "Love Has Had Its Way" in an attempt to get to the truth of the matter: Happy endings don't come easy.  "The Nurses Don't Notice a Thing" takes the listener on a walk with someone looking for hope in a maternity wing, meditating on the beauty of innocence. In "We Smash Plates," the lovers' first argument and consequent makeup is summed up in a mess of broken crockery. By album closer "That Old Ghost," one is left contemplating a lovers' grip and the enduring qualities of love found the hard way.  Marked with the influence of Johnny Cash, Pavement, and The Velvet Underground, produced/engineered/mixed by Nick Terry (Klaxons, Libertines, Bernard Butler), and shot through with the originality and humor one has come to expect from Absentee, Victory Shorts stands alone as the band's strongest, most honest work yet.  "Absentee's very existence makes the world a better place. 9/10." --NME  "Like Lou Reed with grubbier fingerprints. Four stars." --Q

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