I mentioned The Maccabees’ Colour It In just a couple days ago. Only by sheer coincidence, I swear. Like I said in the previous post, the album was something I asked to get as a Christmas gift in 2007. There weren’t any other search results under ‘Colour It In’ apart from that Christmas list email, so it must have been under the tree. Videos for The Maccabees’ singles were appearing on MTV2 in that prime UK-indie-rock-everywhere phase of 2006-07. ‘Latchmere’ was the first Maccabees song I heard, followed by ‘First Love’, ‘About Your Dress’ and then ‘Precious Time’, the latter being the proper lead-up single before the album was released maybe a couple weeks later. I liked ’em all. Then NME made it available to listen to on their website on the media player they had back in the day as an exclusive. In low-quality, but obviously the company weren’t going to share a high-quality version for everyone to hear. And that was enough for me, really, hence the gift request later in the year.

Going into listening through the actual CD, now that I had it in my possession, I think I had my favourites sussed out already from that initial NME.com listen. The singles were a given, but then there were the deeper cuts like ‘Good Old Bill’, ‘O.A.V.I.P.’ and ‘Happy Faces’ that I got into right away. ‘Tissue Shoulders’, placed between the last two listed songs in the previous sentence, was not one of them. I never thought it was bad. But with the placement it had in the track list, sandwiched between two tracks I thought were great, it didn’t leave the biggest impression on me for a long time. This changed maybe only a few years ago too. Now, I was certain that I heard a small, small section of the song – the layered guitars during the ending – in an episode of The Inbetweeners I was re-watching, and just that part made me want to revisit the whole track. I searched ’tissue shoulders the inbetweeners’ on Google before writing this just to be sure, and I got no results. Could any Inbetweeners fan out there who knows each episode by heart, potentially reading this, confirm that I’m not going crazy?

A few songs on Colour It In touch upon the universal subject of relationships. Everyone’s favourite subject. ‘Tissue Shoulders’ is one of them. In it, singer Orlando Weeks aims to give some guidance on what to do if you’re looking to get into a relationship. Find someone who knows what they want out of it. If they can give a shoulder to cry on, hence the ’tissue shoulders’ turn of phrase, that would be preferable too. But by the repetitions of “Don’t want to lie alone” and a view of looking to find “another with a shoestring love heart thong” near the song’s end, he’s probably giving this advice to himself. That’s a tragic element to the track that I never picked up on. But the energetic performance supplied by the rest of the band alongside the words does well to hide it. The song always goes back to the bass hook provided by Rupert Jarvis at the song’s start, with the band’s old drummer Robert Dylan Thomas breaking out some hectic rhythms. What I usually most enjoy about ‘Tissue…’ though, like a lot of songs on Colour It In is the guitar interplay between the White brothers, Hugo and Felix. The way they lock in with those stops and starts at the song’s final moments is probably my favourite part. Many layers to ‘Tissue Shoulders’. One of a number of reasons the album remains my Maccabees release of choice.