31 December 2009

“I know I’m expected to say this, but I can’t believe how strong Hold Me Down is,” says Franceschi. How so? “The fact that we play so much better now is obviously a result of the sheer amount of touring we’ve done. Such a heavy workload means that we’ve got to know each other really well, which infuses the music. If you’re all sharing the lounge of a tour bus on the kind of drives that go on all night – well, let’s say that you make friends with those people, or you get out. And I mean <<real>> friends. When you’re out in the American Midwest for weeks on end, or in a van riding through the Canadian Rockies, there’s nowhere you can escape to.”

You Me At Six

Both in terms of musical finesse and lyrical moxie, Hold Me Down is a stellar stride forward for You Me At Six. The words that can be seen shining back from songs such as Underdog – the verse to which warns of a feeling “that comes and goes like the strength in your bones”, but “to put your mind at rest/I’ll never let the two of us be friends.” Or in Contagious Chemistry where Josh Franceschi warns his “Dearest Enemy,” to, please, never “smother me/I swear that I need some room to breathe/ what with you all up, down and all over me/you’re not a name just a face/it’s contagious.”

To go with such foreboding and resolute sentiments, Hold Me Down is also fortified by the marriage of both the blueprints of classic songwriting – any of these 12 compositions could be distilled into its purest form of one acoustic guitar and one singing voice – with a band who whip and lash like a bed full of firecrackers. Noisy when they choose to be, tender when the occasion demands, usually infectious, You Me At Six are a surplus of energy and motion. Their music is a collection of songs in the key of life.

“Bands these days come and go so quickly,” says Josh Franceschi. “It’s terrifying. But we don’t want to be like that. We want to last, and I believe that we will last, and that we have what it takes. I think listeners will be surprised by Hold Me Down. Some of the kinds of preconceptions some people have about what we’re really about are wide off the mark, and I’m looking forward to putting that right. How are we going to do that? We’re going to do it by working hard: by getting into people’s faces and not going away.”