Frankie Fire’s debut offering is a good album, that reminds me heavily of London punk more than anything else.

Take it In offers echoes of bands like The Clash throughout it, and when coupled with strong lyrics, a dry sense of humour and sheer musical skill the album is well worth buying.

It shows its roots throughout, and it grows them beyond derivation and into inspiration.

The strongest one in my opinion is SOS, the second track on the album. It brings that sense of humour to the fore in an otherwise reasonably traditional song, with the lines “I said I would always be there. I lied. I never tried.” There is a sheer beauty in how that nails so much in the love song genre to the wall so gracefully.

The first track, Brave Face is one of those that I don’t really enjoy, but is in fact very good. The reason I don’t enjoy it is I tend to prefer my music being upbeat and less repetitive, but the music compliments the sort of wear and tear feel of the lyrics too well for me to call it anything but good.

Hurry My Love is wonderfully dark, hinting at that “place for us” not being a place you really want to go while painting a world of fear that the singer urges you to join him in hiding from. There is something deeply wrong with the lyrics, and that is a feature not a bug.

The rest of the album follows this same theme – even where I dislike it I can hear the merit to the music and still heartily recommend it. It isn’t really supposed to be themed, but almost comes across as being as the band ties it all together. I don’t know what this means for future albums, but in this one it rocks and is well worth buying.

It is consistently good; meaning that while the last tracks weren’t the greatest they were good enough to leave me feeling that Frankie Fire won’t end up sputtering out any time soon.

Rating: 8/10