Steven James Adams & The French Drops - Virtue Signals (2018)

After a few years of solo concerts and recordings, singer-guitarist Steven Adams (The Broken Family Band, Singing Adams) rediscovers the virtues of teamwork with The French Drops, a new entity assembled by him and within including the former bassist of Absentee or the rhythm section of the unclassifiable trio The Drink. Two years after the sleek Old Magick, a lovable collection of pop-folk songs published under his own name, Adams decided to entrust Ben Nicholls (Kings of the South Seas, Nadine Shah, Seth Lakeman) with the production of this thrilling Virtue. Signals. “Ben attended one of our rehearsals and started making suggestions on songs, arrangements. It scared us a bit at first, but everything he came up with worked. In the studio, he takes care of everything, which has been oddly liberating. "

Emeritus melodist, Adams is also an acerbic lyricist, grounded in the everyday and clearly disillusioned with the state of British society: “Like many people, I am pissed off and bewildered by the meanness and cowardice of things that can be said. or made in the name of patriotism, cultural identity, or economic prosperity ”. Musically, as revived by the prospect of a new collective experience, Adams seems to have let himself be carried away by the desires of his new collaborators. The krautrock dynamic of Ex-Future or Free Will owes a lot to the strength of the pair Daniel Fordham / David Stewart, escaped from The Drink. Without making any fundamental change in a discography as little-known as it can be rich and fascinating, Virtue Signals is however an indie-rock record with more urban climates, less tinged with country-folk than what the Londoner has since offered us. about fifteen years. For Steven Adams, who remains one of the most elegant, heartfelt and underrated songwriters on the UK indie scene, this return to town is a big comeback.