William – Slightly Delighted

There's a reason Blur were made to change their name from 'Seymour' when they were about to become all big and stuff, and it's because band names that are just men's first names are rubbish. Most likely William will never suffer the same dilemma, because they're not part of some chart-busting new guitar-pop sensation, but if only eh? Still, at least they're not called Will.I.Am like that guy from the Black Eyed Peas.Oh and plus they're pretty excellent also. Their debut album, Self In Fiction, was released last year, and that's really good, just over 45 minutes of abstracted post-hardcore cluttering, like Life Without Buildings being hired as consultants to Fugazi and telling them to ditch the whole 'try-hard' thing, man, just let it out as it comes, without really thinking about it, you dig me? Song structures are lacking, but that's not really the point, and this is a far cry from music that is rubbish because they haven't bothered to write songs. No, this is good.Slightly Delighted just builds on the promise of their debut with slightly more variation, and slightly more restraint. More restraint is not necessarily what William need because they're quite laid-back sorts really, despite the whole spiky guitar thing they have going on, but hey, it works. As for the variation, well, that sounds like an unequivocally good thing, but I'm not entirely sure about moments ('moments' fits William tracks so much better than 'songs', even though they have words and stuff... I don't mean this in a derogatory way though I perhaps normally would) like 'Tacit' where the band strips back to just something acoustic and stringed, bit like the bonus track from the album, both times lucky them it works in context but if the band became just that... well, I don't think so. But I guess I'm prejudiced. Regardless, right now what I do think is I think all the cool kids should get with William right away.PS: I have a better name for them. I think they should change their name to 'Prince William'. I mean, it'd be really lame, but it'd be cool at the same time because people would be like: "Prince William?" and they could just be like, "Prince William, yeah, we just think he's really cool," and people could be like "really?" and they could be like "yeah," but they don't actually think he's cool because that's impossible. 75%William on MySpace