Comparisons with bands of their ilk from the Sixties, Eighties mod, Britpop, Nineties indie etc. are easy to make at almost every turn each song takes but by that very fact they become redundant. Allan Crockford & Mole have distinguished careers playing within a specific genre or two so how likely are they to branch out to something completely different? All of those aformentioned musical styles contained more than a few rubbish bands & plenty more have tried to emulate one or more of those sounds since & failed badly. The Galileo 7 happen to be one of the current acts who manage to both exhibit their influences filtered through their own vision and innovate on the impact those influences have had on each of the four members.

As the album’s title suggests there’s a theme throughout Allan Crockford’s songwriting on this release of not taking the world just at face value and not letting others, either big or small, take a loan of you either physically, mentally of financially. Underpinned for the most part by Vic Bonsels‘ accomplished organ playing, tracks such as ‘Don’t Want To Know’, ‘My Cover Is Blown’ and ‘Don’t Follow Me’ speak to the listener of maintaining honesty with yourself as well as the rest of the world that you have to deal with and everybody being better off for that.

Closing with ‘Little By Little’ brings the thematic structure of the album to a fitting conclusion – sometimes you gift power to those you’re not wholly sure about but you have to give them enough rope, not be surprised when they fail the test and then use that failure as the foundation for something better. The Galileo 7’s False Memory Lane is certainly something better that you may have missed amid the tons of releases we’re all subjected to in the current musical age but now’s the time to redress that.

Kenneth McMurtrie