VIRGIN SOLDIERS – SAFER GROUND EP REVIEW
Virgin Soldiers - Photo by Adam Taylor
When you receive an email in your inbox headed “Virgin Soldiers”, you’ll expect one of two things: either an invitation to a very specialist kind of…err specialised website, or information about a 1969 film about National Service conscripts in Singapore.
You may not be expecting to be directed to the music of a folk rock ensemble. Virgin Soldiers, in this instance at least, are a six piece musical act from Kent and Sussex.
Given a more conventional line up, their tunes would enter a world of chugging heavy rock, well on its way towards Queens of the Stone Age territory. As it is, half of the band are a sting trio. So the chugging is cello based and violins and violas provide the instrumental solos. Ever heard The Divine Comedy’s interpretation of “Noone Knows”? You’ll get the idea.
The band are at their rockiest with “Safer Ground”, the first song from the EP of the same name. It’s filled with rocking bass riffs from the lower strings beneath a snarling vocal. Elsewhere, while the sound becomes mellower, the quality remains high.
Each song is a carefully crafted piece with the kind of gorgeous orchestration you don’t usually get from your standard guitar, bass and drums line up. And though “Sitar Song” doesn’t actually feature a sitar, the band make up for it with an impressive set of thunder sound effects on “Human Race”.
Throughout this EP, themes emerge, disappear and return. Two themes in particular stand out: that of lost love and the desire for freedom.
Both concepts are, of course, far from new in the world of pop music. Songs of lost love and indeed freedom are as old as the Weald of Kent. But Virgin Soldiers manage to sustain the interest regardless with a set of great lyrics and the aforementioned musical greatness.
“Therapy” is a dark, brooding sounding song. It opens with a “Heart Asks the Pleasure First” style piano and strings introduction before the guitar takes it to a more sparse place. It’s not too far removed from the claustrophobic sounds of Silverman from the early noughties.
The lyrics are all about freedom: freedom from fear, freedom from monsters. It sounds like it should be liberating, but the last lyric of “you’ll find that you belong to me” suggests that maybe we won’t be so free after all. Haunting and ever so slightly unnerving.
It’s this almost unhinged desire for possession that runs through “Sitar Song”, a song of the dumped which mourns the passing of a relationship (“don’t you care that you’re hurting me this way”), but still holds on to desperate hope: “if things change, just come home”.
It makes you want to scream: “No! Don’t say that. He’s just cheated on you, you daft girl!” But then love, as we all know, makes us daft people. And it’s this honesty and acknowledgment of weakness which makes Virgin Soldiers stand out.
Elsewhere, the desire for freedom is expressed in other terms. “Safer Ground” is all about getting away from the chaos of a former life. Meanwhile “Human Race” is filled with a desperate desire to escape the drabness of reality (“dressed in grey to fit the norm”), but comes with the gloomy, grim acceptance that we’re all stuck with what we’ve got: “tired look on every face/welcome to the human race”.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously summarised his existentialism with the phrase “hell is other people”. If he’d needed anyone to score that observation, he could have done a lot worse than turn to Virgin Soldiers.
Find out more about Virgin Soldiers at www.virginsoldiers.com