English Teacher, This Could Be Texas (2024)
Release Date: April 12, 2024
Label: Island
Length: 50:25
Produced By: Marta Salogni
Rating: 7.5
Review by: Alexander Hellene
Highlights: “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab,” “I’m Not Crying, “You’re Crying,” “This Could Be Texas,” “R&B,” “Nearly Daffodils,” “Albert Road”
English Teacher is the next great British guitar rock band . . . or so I’ve been told. After all, the Leeds quartet won the prestigious 2024 Mercury Award, didn’t they? They’ve got to be good. And while, in this writer’s personal opinion, the Brits tend to have better rock music than we do Stateside, the British music press’s hype machine has a habit of going a wee bit overboard on heaping praise and anointing this or that group as “the next big thing.” So are English Teacher worth they hype? Are they, truly, the next big thing?
I will tell you, when I saw the word “prog” used to describe this band of twenty-somethings—Lily Fontaine (vocals, guitar, synth), Lewis Whiting (guitar, synth), Douglas Frost (drums, piano, synth, vocals), and Nicholas Eden (bass)—my ears perked up. English Teacher made waves with a few singles in 2020 and 2021, most notably “R&B (Theo Verney Version),” before releasing their critically acclaimed EP Polyawkward in 2022 and a spate of songs in 2023 and 2024, five of which would find there way onto This Could Be Texas. This, coupled with the constant references to the adventurousness of the songwriting and each individual member’s talent on their respective interest, sealed the deal for me: I had to check this band out.
It is with mixed emotions I report that I did not like this album as much as I hoped I would, but I do like this band more than I expected. The the first three-quarters of This Could Be Texas is excellent, some of the best, most interesting songwriting and well-played music I have heard in quite some time.1 If the album ended after the first nine songs, I think I’d have rated it higher. The list of influences English Teacher manage to cram into their own unique sound is dizzying—I hear folk, indie, new-wave, post-punk, and yes, progressive rock, but progressive rock in the English tradition, where it was a mix of Renaissance fair and traditional English music bolstered by synthesizers and odd time signatures and less technical wizardry; think Genesis or Jethro Tull and not Rush. Think theatrics, not bombastics.
So basically it’s theater kid music, but not obnoxious.
And yet, there’s something off about This Could Be Texas. The songwriting, as good as it is, leans heavily on a few repetitive tendencies. Further, This Could Be Texas drags at the end, with the last four songs almost sounding like a different band with a different M.O., leaning heavily on emotive balladry and mood more than daring songwriting choices. It’s not bad by any stretch, but the decision to put those last four songs in a row strikes me as a strange one. Somehow, though, English Teacher has managed to create a coherent whole, and Marta Salogni’s production choices of rounding off the band’s rough edges and really playing up the double- and triple-tracking of Fontaine’s voice give This Could Be Texas’s busy, maximalist music a delicate dream-pop edge that keeps it from becoming overwhelming.
Many of English Teacher’s idiosyncrasies can be heard on opener “Albatross”: Sweet-sounding arpeggios with passing tones that give the harmony a menacing edge, delicate piano/bass interplay, and the band playing across each other, creating a dense, layered sound. The song’s circular chord progression is very OK Computer-era Radiohead. The ending, where Whiting’s repetitive three-beat guitar riff brings to mind a broken record, ushering in a slowly building full band crescendo that abruptly cuts out is highly effective, but get used to it: English Teacher employs the same trick throughout. Fontaine sings in a very cursive, very mid-2000s breathy indie-girl style which might not be for everyone, but it fits for English Teacher, where she is not required to howl over excessively loud guitars and drums. Her lyrics tend towards the everyday, detailing anxieties and relationships and, yes, growing up mixed-race, but imbuing the mundane with world-shattering importance as her voice floats atop her bandmate’s orchestrations.
These tendencies remain in effect on songs like “Broken Biscuits,” with its angular, 5/8 piano riff. Eden and Frost plow directly through the uneven time under Fontaine’s spoken-word recitation of dismay at ineffective leaders who abdicate their responsibility, creating a cross-rhythmic vibe reminiscent of Broken Social Scene; it’s updated indie-prog for the 21st century. By the time the band shifts to 6/8, it’s done so deftly you won’t notice it until you’re a few bars in, but you will notice the steadily rising build up, complete with saxophone skwonks, that abruptly ends like a car slamming into a brick wall. That style of closing out a song is also there on the twisting “Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space”; the dark strummed acoustic guitars and Fontaine’s flat delivery bring to mind Slint’s “Don, Aman,” while the slowly unfolding waves of arpeggios harken to that same band’s masterpiece “Good Morning Captain.” At first, I thought “Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space” would be an angry political screed a la “Whitey on the Moon,” but it’s more tongue in cheek:
Not everybody gets to go to space and that’s okay
Not everybody gets a time to shine
Because if everybody got to go to space
All of its bars would have a line
That said, lines like “Plus if everybody got to go to space/How would space feel like a win?” and “Not everybody gets to go to space, but he did/He worked hard to get himself up/He didn’t go to uni, I’ll tell you how he got there/He attended the school of hard knocks,” suggest a gentle swipe at Elon Musk.
English Teacher’s rock roots come to the fore in some of This Could Be Texas’s best songs, suggesting that there’s a great rock band hiding in there. Defiant “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” features an attractive guitar riff over a chugging rhythm section, like something The Secret Machines would do, but with ethereal vocals and a gorgeous splash into a major-seventh chord in the chorus; probably the most immediate song on the album, krautrock by way of Blur. Up-tempo “I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying,” is a mutant hybrid of R.E.M., The Smiths, and XTC, with airy guitar figures coexisting with burbling, syncopated bass and drums, sounding like an odd-time workout despite being in straight four due to the rhythmic interplay and looping vocals; the spacious chorus breaks provide the ear some grounding before the chaos resumes, and it is immensely satisfying when English Teacher lock into a groove at the end. A true highlight.
English Teacher’s best instincts converge on the title track, a tour de force that packs a lot into its 4:49 run time. Minor piano chords give way to a somewhat jauntier series of runs with an undercurrent of tension as Fontaine describes writing poems and sending them to someone far away, presumably in the U.S.A. or some other country “in a bad state,” a missive to a pen-pal whos reciprocation is left ambiguous. The song starts and stops, builds up and cools down, all delicate emotion until the halfway mark when Whiting begins a series of liner odd-time riffs straight from Tull’s “Thick as a Brick” or Rush’s “Natural Science.” Eden and Frost join in as smashed tone-clusters on a piano provide rhythmic stabs until it’s over. Silence, and then a string trio enters, playing the song’s main melody under Fontaine’s final verse, and ending on an unresolved note. This is the kind of stuff I started this website to discover, and this song makes me glad I did.
That’s the best part of this album: the meat of it is really good. There is a lot of sizzle to this steak, coherence to its diversity. “R&B” is a re-recording of one of the band’s early singles, a dark, angry, bass-led workout showing some punk muscle. I have read it’s about Fontaine’s frustrations at being a mixed-race female in the white male-dominated world of rock, but much like Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” it rings hollow in an era where non-white and non-male musicians are actively sought out and encouraged. Maybe Fontaine doesn’t have “the voice for R&B,” but she’s got a voice for this sort of unique music. Great machine-gun riffing to close it out. Lastly, “Nearly Daffodils,” with its watery guitars and busy bass provides a final burst of high-energy excitement before This Could Be Texas tapers off to its end.
This is not to say songs like the somber and bittersweet “The Best Tears of Your Life,” the weary, jazzy piano-led torch song “You Blister My Paint,” or the off-kilter “Sideboob,” with beautiful synth pads adding color to its chord progression, are bad, but they’re three textured, moody pieces in a row that don’t go anywhere, that don’t offer the twists and turns of the album’s previous songs, or any catharsis. It’s good to have a break in an album’s sequencing—that’s what songs like the folksy “Mastermind Specialism”2 are for—but several such songs in a row cause This Could Be Texas to peter out. Which is a shame, because the sweetly hopeful “Albert Road,” with the bass pedals grounding a plagal cadence that runs the risk of sounding too twee, is an excellent, closer despite once again using the “slowly build up and then stop” method of ending a song.
I did want to like This Could Be Texas more and give it a higher rating. However, after multiple listens, I can’t shake the feeling that the songwriting still needs some refinement. For all the bells and whistles, the twists and turns, the cellos and violins and other creative ways these four find to elevate rock songs into something approaching transcendence, there is room for improvement. And that’s perhaps the best thing about This Could Be Texas: it’s the band’s debut. Which means that they can only get better from here. Don’t let the rating dissuade you—I highly recommend this album, and English Teacher will be a band I’m keeping my eye on in the future—they already show a ton of promise, and if we’re lucky, they’ll be around for a while.
This Could Be Texas
Albatross
The World’s Biggest Paving Slab
Broken Biscuits
I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying
Mastermind Specialism
This Could Be Texas
Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space
R&B
Nearly Daffodils
The Best Tears of Your Life
You Blister My Paint
Sideboob
Albert Road
I have been pleasantly surprised by the music I’ve reviewed for this site, most notably by Cindy Lee, Cloud Nothings, Billie Eilish, and Yard Act. I do have to add English Teacher to this list, warts and all.
This song has some great bass runs played on the instrument’s upper register near the end—Eden’s creative rhythm and note choices deserve a lot of credit for shaping English Teacher’s sound.