Ultimate Painting
Green Lanes
TROUBLE IN MIND
7/10
Within the half-hour in which Green Lanes—Ultimate Painting‘s second LP—takes place, you can count on one hand the amount of times that the instrumentation strays from simple, effect-free guitars, bass, and drums. Ironically, stripping down to bare essentials is a particularly ambitious aesthetic for a rock band to go for nowadays, and by utilizing it persuasively, the duo of Jack Cooper and James Hoare have quickly put themselves in the position of imminently eclipsing their other bands (Mazes and Veronica Falls, respectively). Ultimate Painting is imbued with a maddeningly effortless charm, and despite the fact that they hail from the UK, the music has a weirdly American tone to it—a rather curious characteristic that makes tracks like “(I’ve Got the) Sanctioned Blues” all the more entertaining when you catch their accents peeking through. As it turns out, though, “You’ve really fucked me” is a phrase that has no borders.
