Ou Est Le Swimming Pool - The Golden Year

Ou Est Le Swimming Pool’s success in 2010 has been such that the release of their debut album should have been cause for celebration for the UK electro outfit. However, following the death of singer Charles Haddon at a European music festival in August, The Golden Year instead acts as a sad legacy and marks the end of a three-piece that had really only just got started. After speaking with the late Haddon’s family, the remaining band members decided that releasing the record as scheduled was the correct thing to do.

Opener You Started, with its piano and strings, is an interesting, if slightly misleading, stripped-down introduction. More left turns like this throughout The Golden Year would have been nice but, as the obligatory 80s synths arrive in the next song, it’s pretty much exclusively up-tempo, indie-laden dance from then on. But for a couple of fillers, it’s largely above-average stuff, and is punctuated by the occasional belter like the feel-good indie-dance-pop magnificence of Dance The Way I Feel and the adrenaline rush of Jackson’s Last Stand.

The Golden Year isn’t a brilliant album, but it is a solid debut with more than a couple of glimpses of the potential that Ou Est Le Swimming Pool had. It also shows the charisma and energy that Haddon brought as a vocalist. His was certainly a talent lost well before his time and the fact that The Golden Year gives off such an unabashed sense of joy and optimism makes it all the more difficult to listen to in light of the all-too-recent tragedy that hangs over it like a cloud.