Review: English Teacher - This Could Be Texas

by Kathryn Thompson

I don't usually notice the Mercury Music Prize. I heard a brief clip of the 2024 winner, English Teacher, on a UK news podcast, though, and something made me look for more. (Somebody mentioned that they were from Leeds and I'm from the north of England myself, so maybe that helped.) I found the album, 'This Could Be Texas', on Spotify and dug in at random, expecting to be disappointed, the next big thing in the emperor's new clothes. Still, start with track three because that's usually a strong one, right?
 
I find 'Broken Biscuits', an off-kilter waltz about hard times and managing the unmanageable. It has rumbles and angles, complex rhythms and the sort of piano that sounds tinny and unnerving; the sections of spoken word are in an accent that I could have heard on the bus as a kid in Greater Manchester. It comes to a wailing end in brass and this is, somehow, not at all what I was expecting. 

I skip back to the track before, because who calls a song 'The World's Biggest Paving Slab'? That turns out to have a classic post-punk lead bassline, metronomic drums, and a woman talking to the world, about the world and her place in it, in her own voice - and then it blossoms into the open, sparkling sound of the chorus and I know I've been hooked.
 
'I'm Not Crying, You're Crying' is built of more familiar things - kind of Sleater-Kinney meets Bloc Party with a side of Manic Street Preachers - but still does something new with it. 'Mastermind Specialism' is another unnerving waltz, a lullaby sung over the discord of the mechanical, material world, and what even is 'Not Everyone Gets To Go To Space'? A rumination about the fundamental inequality of things (if everyone had the same, would we value it) or a critique of privilege and people's strange ideas about what they've earned, or, well, just making something out of all of that, that has me abstractedly singing "who built the ships" at strange moments?
 
I can see why people have heard (the song called) 'R&B' and thought of Wet Leg, what with the flat affect and general limber electro-ish post-punk-ness, though sometimes I wonder if that just means 'detectably British female voice'. The lyrics are about expectations and what might happen if we refuse to pander to them, though, which seems like a different approach, less guarded with irony. "If I have stuff to write, then why don't I just write it for me?" 

Perhaps that's the key question of the album. I suspect 'Albatross' wasn't written for her, see, and it's one of the most mundane, plodding songs on the whole album; even the singing is in the pop-approved, arch-vowel, vocal-fry style, although there is a bit of art-rock promise in the clicky, ascending end. I’m glad I didn't start at the first song of this album or I'd have bounced right off. 'The Best Tears Of Your Life' is the other clunker, to my ears, and interviews I've seen suggest it happened under studio pressure. You have to try things out, sure, but some things just don't fire.
 
The real measure, to my mind, is that there's some music here that I wouldn't have thought I would like to listen to, and yet I do. 'Sideboob' sounds like a daydream in a deckchair in the fleeting British sun, and it's about missing home in the shape of a local landmark. 'You Blister My Paint' is both sparser and darker, the sort of audio hallucination that reaches out from the edge of uncomfortable, unsatisfying sleep. 'Albert Road' is heart-breaking, really, a lament for missed opportunities, and it’s far too close to home for me to ignore, even if I have travelled far away. 

'Nearly Daffodils' was a single, and is it a pop song? About a relationship? While also having the most driving, energetic, busy rhythm of the whole thing and a distinct art-rock carelessness about whether any of it fits with expected structure? And I think that's what this album does best; questions and conversations and propositions, often up-close and personal. (The band name is because they all liked their English teachers at school.) The sounds shimmer or ring or wail or whisper or squeak or rattle, here, because we don't know whether that works but it's worth a try, because there isn't an easy answer or a single right answer. Pop's confidence that it knows what you like can be reassuring, but maybe behind that front, this is the nuance there could always be.