The Rifles
Love Your Neighbour LP
The Rifles are a band who regularly invade the indie charts with their album releases, but Love Your Neighbour benefits from people finally being ready for heartfelt guitar music (and vinyl) once again. The Sherlocks had their biggest chart success with 2023’s People Like Me & You, and now The Rifles can enjoy the same with Love Your Neighbour.
In terms of sound, The Rifles have developed a full-bodied Brit sound that draws on the greats, from classics like The Jam, The Kinks, and The Beatles to more recent waves like Kula Shaker, Delays, and The Verve.
Lyrically, there’s a level of observational satire that elevates the album to a gold standard. This thread is twisted to bring different effects, from cheeky to razor-sharp. To whit, ‘Days Of Our Lives’ delivers a verse like this:
Supa dupa Tennents would get things done
You couldn’t even walk let alone run
Then we’d be declaring our undying love
Whilst the girl with the biggest ones just rolls her eyes
On the musical side, different hooks that wait to entertain you, for example ‘Mr Sunflower’ gives us a steel drum flicker, a guitar motif, and a metallophone lick in the chorus, which also gives the album its title. This richness of ideas is a common theme on this record.
The quality never really fluctuates. While you’ll have personal favourites, you’ll be forced to admit an absence of dead spots. I just scanned the whole album and each intro brought an appropriate flicker of recognition followed by the pleasant anticipation of the rest of the song.
On top of the singles, ‘The Kids Won’t Stop’, ‘Days Of Our Lives’, ‘Mr Sunflower’, and ‘All Aboard’… a special mention goes to the psychedelic-edged ‘Money Go Round’ and the stereo-flourish of the guitars in ‘My Life’.
Love Your Neighbour is saying we’re all in this big old mess together and it would be good to get along a bit more and enjoy it. Talk to people more, help each other out when you can, say good morning and maybe take your head away from your phone for 5 minutes and appreciate the people standing next to you. I’d like to think that the record captures life’s daily situations that we all come across, all wrapped up in 3 minute bundles that you can sing along to.
Joel Stoker
Watch The Rifles – ‘Days Of Our Lives’.
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