It's not been a vintage year for guitar bands. In fact, it's been more like a vinegary bottle of Echo Falls that's been left open for a fortnight and you've decided to save for cooking instead. But then you remember Keith Floyd saying: "If a wine's not good enough to drink, it's not good enough to cook with," so you've thrown it away. Are we getting away from the subject of this blog a little?
What we're trying to say is, despite guitar bands being a bit in the doldrums right now, people are getting excited at the return of the Maccabees. That's because they've been bowled over by their comeback track Pelican, all stop-start guitar blasts and impassioned vocals.
The band have spent two years working on the follow-up to 2009's brilliant Wall o Arms and the result is Given to the Wild. Due on 9 January, it has Tim Goldsworthy (LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture, DFA, Unkle) and Bruno Ellingham behind the production desk.
We're premiering the video for Pelican here, in which various objects – piggy banks, burgers, clocks – float through space before being sliced in half. Interesting, especially to those of you who've always wondered what the inside of a metronome looks like.
