It Won't Always Be Like This is a hooky and exuberant pop rock debut from the Dublin foursome that makes good on early promise
You may have heard that Eli Hewson, lead singer, Jeff Buckley lookalike, and guitarist of Inhaler, has a rather famous rock star father. It’s a bloodline that’s seen the frighteningly young Dublin act feted and damned in equal measure. Naysayers bitch that well-oiled cogs were grinding in the background during their rapid rise, while yaysayers just dig Inhaler’s suss and nous for bright, melodic songs bristling with old-fashioned hooks, choruses, and quicksilver guitar riffs.
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So, damned if they do and damned if they don’t, Eli and his bandmates, bassist Robert Keating, guitarist Josh Jenkinson, and drummer Ryan McMahon, have taken the revolutionary step of letting the actual songs do the actual work.
Hewson, who possesses one of the best new rock voices in an age (and yes, he does sound a lot like his old man), has been friends with his compatriots since school and with an average age of 20, they handle the twin pressures of expectation and sniping in their swaggering stride.
It Won’t Always Be Like This (the title of an early single repurposed as a slogan of hope amid our current Weltschmerz) is a confident and diverse collection that knows when to play it straight with anthemic pop-rock songs but also when to short circuit the polished pop machinery with experimentation and the kind of vision that promises a lot for Inhaler’s future.
The sky-scraping euphoria of The Killers - when they were good - can be detected on the beefy title track, which turns a wall of guitars in and on itself, but by the time Hewson’s sullen but hopeful vocal kicks in on My Honest Face (all cruising west coast rock and guitar heroics), Inhaler already sound like they can’t be contained by lazy comparisons.
Keating and McMahon are an impressive engine room and Jenkinson knows how to keep those riffs tightly wound before unleashing them with ferocity. Most of all, Inhaler sound like they’re playing out of their skins. Not least on the dark dub of the soul that is Night on The Floor, which beats a skanking retreat from foursquare guitar, drums and bass convention, and features a lyric sheet ("sinners saved by saints, god bless the madness of the fifty states") that may just remind you of someone.
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When it Breaks ("Like Paris in ’45, waiting for the whole world to come alive") is another slice of prime Killers rump, and the sophisto pop of Slide out The Window is another pleasant detour, but it’s the epic six-minutes plus of Who’s Your Money that stands out. An energetic funk-rock - circa 1983 - workout that ducks and dives before heading off on vapour trails of Radiohead atmospherics and Hewson's truly impressive vocals.
This a surging debut that packs a power pop punch in the first half before loosening up for a more impressionistic trip into blurred nightscapes and bad vibes. Bursting with soaring choruses and expansive ambition, these songs of inexperience grapple with love and life on the teenage wasteland with real drama but also with the good grace to realise one’s own ridiculousness.
Worth a lungful.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
