Big Deal - Sakura EP

Their debut album, Lights Out, was all tightly wound aggression, acoustic guitar juxtaposed by it’s growling electric counterpoint, razor-sharp vocal slurs delivered in the softest of tones. Repressed angst, repressed love, repressed sexual tension.

The band have come a long way since then, expanding their line-up to allow them to unleash all the energy and bitter vitriol that their debut promised. It seems fitting, therefore, that the band open new EP Sakura with a reprisal of the aforementioned fuzzed-up acoustic anti-ballad. It’s not so much a re-imagining as a realising of its full potential given as much power and feeling musically as was present in the simple chorus sentiment “all I want to do is talk, but seeing you fucks me up”.

But here-in lies the sole problem with Big Deal’s latest offering. Their follow-up to last year’s June Gloom begins by demonstrating the distance the band have travelled since their debut and in doing so highlights the inexplicable void that’s present despite their increasingly dense arrangements.

What was beautiful about Big Deal circa Lights Out was the rawness and intimacy created by their basic configuration and lo-fi production. Alice Costelloe and Kacey Underwood crooned together in unison so convincingly that listening to Lights Out felt like eavesdropping on the most private of conversations between a pair of lovers or best friends.

This is not to say that the fully-formed figure which Big Deal have metamorphosed into is at all bad. On the contrary, the EP hints at the desire and ambition that makes their next full-length such an exciting prospect. There are nods to Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement in the raucous guitars on closing track “Figure It Out” while title track “Sakura” has the melancholy magnificence of The Cure, references that it would be difficult to draw with a two-piece acoustic act.

But it’s impossible not to feel cheated out of a much more intimate affair from Kacey and Alice when that intimacy isn’t traded for the kind of guttural intensity that could and should match the band’s new grandiose sound.

Sakura means simply ‘cherry blossom’, in Japanese, hence the line “cherry blossom girl, floating in the wind” in the title track. But Sakura can also be taken to mean ‘cloud’, in reference to the appearance of a cherry tree in full blossom. For Big Deal, Sakura, should mean new life, growth and possibility rather than an approaching cirrus or cumulonimbus. Because whilst with Sakura they haven’t quite achieved that elusive balance between the raw emotion and intimacy that made Big Deal so enticing in the first place and the intensity and power of a full band, all the signs suggest they will soon. From Alice and Kacey all we need to hear…is talk.