Bruiser

The Duke Spirit are a band you want to root for, blessed as they are with an alluring frontwowan (Liela Moss) and good taste (drawing on everything from 1980s UK indie to northern soul to murder ballads), but also a willingness to burnish those outsider sources with a considerable sass and swagger to bring the masses on-side. And yet, the masses have been mostly resistant to their charms— the London group first surfaced in 2005 in the shadow of the similarly seedy but more widely celebrated Kills … , while the ensuing years have seen upstart acts like the Joy Formidable emerging with more bombastic, attention-grabbing takes on shared noise-pop influences.

The title of the Duke Spirit’s third album would suggest they’re tired of being relegated to second-class NME citizenry and ready to show the kids who’s boss. But Bruiser— produced by alt-rock spit-shiner Andrew Scheps— feels oddly restrained, as the band sounds caught between the duelling desires to hold onto its grit-rock roots and to make its sound more sophisticated. The Duke Spirit have always attempted a tricky balancing act in their music—between the classic and the modern, the dissonant and the accessible, the decadent and the elegant— but sometimes you wish they’d forsake this mode of controlled tension and give in to more extreme tendencies. Early singles “Love Is an Unfamiliar Name” and “Cuts Across the Land” weren’t exactly textbook-definition ragers, but they still possessed a certain thrust, swing, and vigor; by contrast