Blood Red Shoes are Steven Ansell and Laura-Mary Carter, two punk kids from the South of England who by their own admission are “just trying to be in a decent band”. They’ve been around a while, releasing their debut 7″ back in July 2005 but a series of tours and blistering live shows over the last twelve months have brought them to the attention of a wider audience. Box Of Secrets sometimes suffers from too little variation in songs but hey, there’s two of them, what you gonna do? There are a fair few grungey riffs, ‘ooh, oohs’ and handclaps, it’s not a million miles away from when Ash came screaming onto the indie scene over a dozen years ago. There are shades of Nirvana and the Pixies, in fact when Laura-Mary takes on the backing vocals they don’t sound unlike Cardiff’s own Victorian English Gentlemens Club.
On record the band do lose a bit of the rawness that makes their live show so thrilling but the album still has enough tunes and enough energy to make it worth purchasing. It’s ideal for sticking on the stereo and jumping around to when you’re getting ready to go out on a Saturday night. Probably not what the band were aiming for exactly but this is a band that don’t even like being called ‘indie’, it’s probably hard to make them happy.
Box Of Secrets is available on CD and vinyl in Diverse Music now.
