Stories swirled about Murray’s lust for power and the troubled recording sessions for the follow-up album. The ensemble that seemed just as the last album’s title suggests – a gang – collapsed in acrimony and confusion. He and the keyboardist (Natalia) had married and squeezed out a pup, but then, rather than becoming serene and blissful, the band imploded. The chance to interview Murray, though, worried me greatly. Seeing them at the 930 Club in 2005 turned into a rather transparent way of spending more quality time with them at DC9 afterward, and their next album, “Gang of Losers,” was in my BYT top ten albums of 2006.
I would see them every chance I had, and have never, ever been even slightly disappointed. After an extraordinary night of drinking at an after-hours Britpop pub, I had far too much to process, but the conclusion remains that the Dears changed my life. The Go! Team were at their sublime peak, and the two bands – the Dears emotionally overwhelming, the Team mindblowingly exuberant – acted as the perfect disease-and-cure combination on the night. They played with the Go! Team, and I fell in love, twice in the same night. The Dears followed the hype with incessant world touring, where I happened upon them at Festival Les Inrocks in Paris in November 2004. As a vocalist, lead singer and songwriter Murray Lightburn has been compared to Britpop legends Damon and Jarvis, but on the “No Cities Left” album, he leaves those comparisons in the dust. The Smiths never reached the level of raw emotion on display here, but some of the touchstones are the same. I rushed out to buy the “Lost in the Plot” single, and was stunned by the incredible power of it. That set buoyed them to a licensing deal with the Scottish record label Bella Union, run by former Cocteau Twins bassist Simon Raymonde. My love for them came relatively late, in 2004, after hearing of them because of the tidal wave of hype they generated with a now-legendary set at the 2004 SXSW Festival.
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