Farleigh are five lads that met at Music College in Birmingham and thereabouts.
Raised on a heady diet of Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Steely Dan, Fountains of Wayne and Muse, Farleigh's contemporary take of bluesy riffs, rock and cool melody is starting to turn heads.
The band spent most of last year in the studio recording and experimenting and then they came out back into the light with their first EP, adeptly named FARLEIGH. (Available www.farleigh.info)
"Open Road sounds like Foo Fighters in a Sunday morning mood; the chorus rocks just enough to let the sweet melody shine through." - Music Mart Magazine
"Found, meanwhile, sounds like what Chris Martin might come up with after he'd had an injection of Britpop serum." - Music Mart Magazine
The band is Harry - lead vocals, Joe - electric guitar, Martyn - bass, Thom - guitar and vocals, Chris - drums.
LATEST REVIEW
Miracles Happen
(August 24th, O2 Islington, London) Some bands rock-up five minutes before they are due to perform just to spend an age adjusting - by which I mean showboating - before they perform.
Farleigh are not one of those bands, arriving four hours early to rehearse and painstakingly adjust their instruments and sound levels. Good for them.
Their performance at the O2 Islington was delivered with a clean, solid sound so essential for a group whose strengths lie in song writing and technical proficiency.
Fortunately, for a would-be rock act, it was all delivered through the one of the most chilled performances of their careers.
Surface details - bigger hair, tighter trousers - helped add to the sense that this band is really developing some style, born no doubt from a new found confidence in the band’s direction, and have stopped worrying about how to get off square one.
Vocalist Harry Lightfoot has dumped the guitar to sit at the key-boards, freeing him up for occasional bouts of reckless mic-cable swinging, while new boy in the drummers chair Chris Carter generated some very solid sounds for the three men on guitars to swing their strings to.
Though I would have preferred to hear a completely new set of new material, standout indy track True Life Miracle was as catchy as swine flu-sneezes and showing us a glimpse of the band’s potential to make some extremely marketable music.
Will Robins