Prinzhorn Dance School - Clay Class

2008    Harry Redknapp is busy assembling the highly-paid Portsmouth team that will win the FA Cup a year later. Gordon Brown still thinks he has put an end to boom and bust. Prinzhorn Dance School release a debut album of mesmerising austerity. It stands out from the landscape of X Factor detritus and apolitical indie like John The Baptist at a hunt-ball. The people who get it, really get it. The people who don’t, really don’t. A Guardian reviewer gives it two different star ratings, just to be sure.

2011    With Britain – and Portsmouth FC come to that – on the verge of bankruptcy, David Cameron’s conservative-led coalition launches the most savage assault ever made on the fabric of the British welfare state. Suddenly, the things about Prinzhorn Dance School’s music which people found bewildering – its starkness, its sombre wit – feel a bit more familiar. The band’s comeback single ‘Seed, Crop, Harvest’ actually seems to offer listeners a grain of hope. Some people even think it has a chorus.

In response to the warmth they'd experienced playing live to responsive crowds all across Europe, Tobin Prinz (voice, guitar, drums) and Suzi Horn (voice, bass, drums) were determined "to bring in some colour and some tenderness" to their second album.  "If you’re going to face up to really difficult underlying themes", says Prinz, "sometimes the best way to do that is to let a bit of optimism in there”. And while optimism is not a quality with which this band's name was initially associated, the celebratory undertow of ‘The Flora and Fauna of Britain in Bloom’ – “a tin of mixed fruit on a special occasion” – confirms that the light at the end of the tunnel does not always have be an oncoming train.

"Even though our band lives in two different places at once - Brighton and Portsmouth", Prinz explains, "a sense of belonging doesn't really happen in either. I think that’s a wider issue which probably affects millions of people in this country, and the empty spaces Suzi and I are interested in – fields; lakes; warehouses; the sea; huge, people-less car-parks, or even the gaps in our music itself – simultaneously amplify that feeling, and give you the room to ask questions about it”.

It's hard to think of a band whose music gives a more thrillingly clear picture of what living in 21st century Britain is actually like than Prinzhorn Dance School. And from the livid call and response of 'Your Fire Has Gone Out' to the sensual domestic harmony of 'Sing Orderly', this not-so-difficult second album is a record to entrance sceptics and re-convert the converted…

The bell has sounded for Clay Class. It's time to get your hands dirty.

TRACKLISTING:

01 Happy in Bits 02 Usurper 03 Seed Crop Harvest 04 I Want You 05 Your Fire Has Gone Out 06 Crisis Team
07 The Flora and Fauna of Britain in Bloom 08 Turn Up the Lights 09 Sing Orderly 10 Right Night Kay West
11 Shake the Jar

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