Peace - Kindness Is The New Rock and Roll

Rating:

Peace at their most positive. Even in its darkest moments, there’s a sense of undeniable hope.

'Album' of 'the Week'

Peace are an important band. While their first two albums have fizzed with the day-glo energy of a band drawing influence from the past before warping it into their own acid washed, tie-dye world, that vitality doesn’t simply come from their own output. Their arrival - and the scene from which they grew - paved the way for so many of the impossibly exciting underground-slash-mainstream bothering bands that pepper 2018. Without them, the groundwork for Wolf Alice, Shame or countless others simply wouldn’t be there. They may still have broken through, but it wouldn’t have been easy.

That’s because Peace have always felt to be more than just a band. A force of personality, infectious but unforced, they’ve never allowed themselves to become the last gang in town. Open, inclusive and charged with the wide-eyed hope of youth, even as they grow older, they still feel a million miles from the grumpy claws of the ‘seen it all before’ moaners, so eager to ruin the kids’ fun. If anything, they’re pulling away.

If anything, ‘Kindness Is The New Rock And Roll’ is Peace at their most positive. Even in its darkest moments - such as the hauntingly effective ‘From Under Liquid Glass’ - there’s a sense of undeniable hope. In part, that’s down to a new, bolder outlook. This is still Peace, but delivered in a purer form than ever before.

‘You Don’t Walk Away From Love’ is packed with bombast - strutting on a singular guitar line, cocksure and proud - while the title-track takes hippieish sentiment and turns it into starry-eyed possibility.

It’s a theme that turns what could have been a desperate throw of the dice into a manifesto to believe in. Closer ‘Choose Love’ swells the heart, while ‘Magnificent’ pleads “don’t give up on me just yet”. There’s no chance of that. Give Peace a chance, and they’ll save us all. Stephen Ackroyd