Many of UK Alternative's most notable recent debuts have foregrounded their humor/exaggeration/anger (delete where applicable) and loudly voiced their intentions in ways that made their niche clear from the start. The English Teacher's long-awaited opening statement takes a trickier path. This Could Be Texas is an album that expands with every listen. It's not something that's easily categorized, and I don't think it was written with the easily digestible earworm in mind. Instead, the Leeds quartet has chosen to follow a highly diverse path, with its thread of connection primarily found in poetry. Filled with tenderness and a rare, soft sentimentality, this song brings the band to the rickety post-punk of “The World's Biggest Paving Slab,” the auto-tuned experimentalism of “Best Tears of Your Life,” and “Best Tears of Your Life.” You can group the fragile piano-driven sweetness of “Life.” Heartbreaking highlight “You Blister My Paint” still falls under a cohesive umbrella.
Their not-so-secret weapon is vocalist Lily Fontaine. She's a frontwoman who has audibly blossomed since the band's relatively recent beginnings, in a manner reminiscent of Ellie Rowsell's rise to stardom with Wolf Alice. Their 2021 groundbreaking track “R&B,” which completely broke the stereotypes of the genre, has been reworked here. The vocals are sharper and cutter, and the production is beefed up and direct, evoking Lily's journey from her first moves to the present day. But it's moments like “Mastermind Specialism,” where its rich vocals lend themselves to strange, sad, nostalgic couplets (“I'm the lamb you had for tea/And I'm the tiger who came ”) or placed in the middle of something epic. On nearby “Albert Road,” her voice reaches an incredible crescendo and you can hear the full range of what she's capable of.
“This Could Be Texas” is full of complex elements that no English teacher would have had the confidence to execute even 18 months ago. Lewis Whiting's guitar treads into the glittery Graham Coxon-like realm that often stirs up noise on live stages, but here it's cleaner, giving 'Nearly Daffodils' a mathematical sensibility. , colluding with Nicholas Eden's bass to weave in the repeated mantra of “.” I'm not crying, you're crying. ” The album's title track pauses with spring-like sounds and violins before “Not Everyone Gets To Go To Space” arrives like an old video game rebooted in an attic for years. Throughout, Lily's lyrics dance between the familiar, humorous, and homely, and the more episodic and bizarre. “My mother's bones are broken/Her pictures are cut out/Her prescriptions are split/Her biscuits are broken.”
Overall, the image this work depicts is very rich. As well as the album itself, it portrays English Teacher as the opposite of an outlandish buzz band. We are just getting started as a group. The sentiment behind 'This Could Be Texas' is that it could be anywhere, but already the Leeds quartet have secured themselves as something much more singular than that.