Nouveau single digital " Hometown" disponible le 15 octobre 2012.

LP disponible le 22 octobre 2012. 

Who is Andy Burrows? No-one really seems to know. Is he a songwriter? A singer? A producer? A collaborator? A drummer? An ex-drummer? Pinning down this affably anxious 32-year-old is a tough task. Until recently, his Wikipedia page was a wonderfully vague entry that surmised the multi-instrumentalist-singing-drumming-songwriter thus: “Andy Burrows began his musical career as a percussionist in the Hampshire County Youth Band”. Burrows himself neither had the skills necessary to amend the page, and was too embarrassed to ask someone else to do it.
So let’s embellish the story of the Hampshire County Youth Band’s percussionist extraordinaire then, shall we? In the mid-‘00s, Andy Burrows was an out-of-work drummer. Two bands, both employing the late-‘90s one-syllable-four-letters rule of bandnames, User and Stag, had led him down a cul-de-sac of toilet tours and eventual splits. Then he joined an up’n’coming indie band called Razorlight, wrote their biggest hit, toured the world, headlined Reading, had fun, fanfare and fistfights along the way. Then he left Razorlight.
His songwriting prowess already demonstrated, it seemed entirely reasonable that Burrows would embark on a solo career. And so he did. His last year with Razorlight had seen the release of a solo mini-album, the quaint lo-fi lullabies of Colour Of My Dreams, and in the summer of 2010, under the banner of I Am Arrows, Andy release his first solo record proper, the glorious glitch-pop of Sun Comes Up Again. Company, though, will be released under his own name. “After I left Razorlight, I feel like the small amount of people who cared were like, Well, you’ve left a big band, what you gonna do now? Now, I’m not worried about doing it under my own name at all.”
The past year has seen Burrows embark on an incredibly prolific purple patch. First he joined up with long-time friend and Editors frontman Tom Smith as Smith & Burrows for 2011’s Funny Looking Angels, an album of wintery vignettes and Christmas melancholy. Then, he agreed to decamp in New York to become a full-time member of We Are Scientists alongside Keith Murray and Chris Cain (he played drums on their 2010 album Barbara). Before that, he released If I Had A Heart, a one-off single with independent label Distiller, wrote a song for promising starlet Delilah that appears on her imminently released debut, did the soundtrack for spy comedy Johnny English 2 with Ash frontman Tim Wheeler and embarked on an unfinished band/project with Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt. A new solo album was on his to-do list, he insists, but not for the foreseeable future.
“My plan was to put out a couple of singles whilst we did Scientists,” he says, “and then PIAS offered me a record deal. I thought, Fuck it, if there’s people who believe in me, I’d love to make a record.” The result is an album that’s Burrows’ truest yet. If the radiant Sun Comes Up Again was imbued with a deliberate contrary streak (“I think there’s a few more bleeps on it than there would have been if I’d been more myself,” he says now), then here Burrows embraces a straight-ahead approach; write a song, put it down. It was an idea that had its roots on the Smith & Burrows tour. “We did a version of If I Had A Heart that was very stripped-down. It was getting such a good reaction that it made me realise, That’s what this record has to be about.”
From there, Burrows has built an album steeped in rock classicism and raw, melancholic melodies. With the pressure off, Burrows sounds effortlessly intoxicating. Self-produced with Smith & Burrows knob-twiddler Tim Baxter assisting him, some of the songs have existed in various forms for years. The plaintive, euphoric swirl of Hometown sits at the centre of the record. A stark beginning that gives way to an orchestral whoosh before coming to a sudden end just as you think it might explode into a classic prog opus, it’s less-is-more approach sums up the whole record.
Then there’s the rock’n’roll stomp of Keep On Moving On. Emerging during Burrows’ studio time with Mark Ronson (Ronson has a co-credit) and Andrew Wyatt, Burrows’ decided he liked it so much he wanted to keep it for himself. Its Brian Wilson harmonies, summer-of-love groove and Guitar Hero solo (courtesy of We Are Scientists’ Keith Murray) showcase a previously-unseen swagger. When Burrows says that Company marks the first time he’s had to confidence to make a record “exactly how I felt musically and lyrically”, Keep On Moving On is the proof. Whilst the string swells and hazy, percussive march of Company, the bittersweet Lennon-esque Somebody Calls Your Name and the atmospheric dreaminess of Stars are delivered with a charming restraint, the incessant pound of Shaking comes across like peak-era Supergrass. All are injected with Burrows’ way with an earworming hook.
Company is the sound of an artist who’s thrown the shackles off and emerged as an bewilderingly creative tour-de-force. “I want for as many people as possible to hear this,” he concludes. “Every day, I just make sure I don’t sit on my arse. I wanna be working the entire time. I don’t wanna have a day off until I’m where I wanna be. I wanna have a hit record, whether I wrote it, recorded it or drummed on it. And I’ll keep making records until everyone loves it. And then they’ll go back and dig the back catalogue.” And that, in thrilling fist-on-the-table proof, is exactly who Andy Burrows is.