Unsigned Act Of The Week: Secateurs

Infatuation: an intense but short-lived passion or admiration for someone or something.  However, once in a blue moon, the heavy zeal you feel towards a band really pulls on your heart strings and, soon enough, you’ll find yourself wondering how lost you’d be if you hadn’t discovered that band or that song.  It’s rare to find a band that posses this influential trait to change your life. However, for underground three piece Secateurs, their explosion onto everybody’s lips may be sooner than they think.

Secateurs are an indie rock n’ roll three piece hailing from Deeside, North Wales. Deeside might be primarily known for its prominence in industry, but soon enough Secateurs are going to put their hometown on the map for all the right reasons.

On the band’s own personal blog, they sum up their songs as being ‘catchy guitar driven rock songs, discussing lust and alcoholism in a manner that you can dance to’.  This interesting approach to describing their protruding sound shrouds the band in mystery and invites the listener further into their distinctive, edgy and simply un-forgettable music.

Secateurs’ debut single ‘She Lost Her Mind’ is three minutes forty nine seconds worth of utterly tantalising darkness. Preventing your mouth from gaping open is almost physically impossible as the sneering vocals and tormenting guitar riffs plough the listener into the depths of eerie obscurity.  It’s creepy, it’s murky; but most of all its prolifically electrifying.

Favouring the creative heavy auras on their tracks, Secateurs use a combination of severe basslines, complemented with sinister alternative guitar solos, holding songs such as ‘Howl At The Moon’ together. The strange feelings that arise from listening to this track can’t be shaken off in a hurry.

If you can’t wait until February 1st for the release of the gigantic bomb that is ‘She Lost Her Mind’, then you can download Secateurs’ EP “Live at The Compass” from http://secateurs.bandcamp.com/ now. This five track EP highlights the vulnerability and gritty rawness which the band use to their advantage on ‘Breaking The Streak’. The track is the definitive song on the EP: brimming with sophistication, capturing the emotion of the band in a cold, black light.

Secateurs certainly are something special. The gloomy connotations that hound their way through the shimmering songs are a contrast that many artists have tried and failed. Secateurs are something fresh for 2014. When the  door that currently traps  them in the underground finally crashes open, the band’s sound will wreak havoc on the world. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Ella Scott

Mari Lane

Mari Lane

Editor, London. Likes: Kathleen Hanna, 6Music, live music in the sunshine. Dislikes: Sexism, pineapples, the misuse of apostrophes.