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Louis O’Bryen and Asha Lorenz of Sorry perform live at Koko in London
Louis O’Bryen and Asha Lorenz of Sorry perform live at Koko in London. Photograph: Lorne Thomson/Redferns
Louis O’Bryen and Asha Lorenz of Sorry perform live at Koko in London. Photograph: Lorne Thomson/Redferns

Sorry: 925 review – full of disruptive ideas

This article is more than 4 years old
(Domino)

Part of the London scene loosely headquartered at Brixton’s Windmill pub (from Fat White Family to Goat Girl and beyond), Sorry have undergone a radical upgrade in the two years since they started turning heads. Once a scratchy, pointedly blank boy-girl duo, their live band now numbers four and their ambitions stretch beyond indie rock.

Near the end of their debut album, a whimsical folk-pop song called Heather imagines a world where Sorry aren’t passive-aggressive misanthropes, but writers of whimsical sync-bait. A reworked oldie, Ode to Boy, is even more promising: a curdled takedown of a love song, its degraded sounds and malfunctioning effects play off against Asha Lorenz’s sarcastic pop vocal.

So 925 packs in more than a few disruptive ideas. But Sorry haven’t yet acquired the musical vocabulary to pull them off. They remain delightfully sullen – like a London post-punk take on the Kills, if a little groovier and brassier around the edges (a saxophone features intermittently) – but with a marked lean that, like a stubborn shopping trolley, keeps pulling them towards indie rock. On the plus side, Lorenz and fellow writer Louis O’Bryen take a gloriously dim view of human relations, and updated songs like Lies (Refix) join previously released highlights like Rock ‘n’ Roll Star and Right Round the Clock in skewering the gulf between romance and bitter reality.

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