Everyone knows someone who has stayed in a broken relationship for one specific reason.
Blood Red Shoes are the musical equivalent. With a career long dogged by rumours that Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell couldn’t stand one another, things came to head in 2014 at the end of a strenuous tour, resulting in a half-year communication breakdown.
Somehow the duo have patched things up and channelled their irritable claustrophobia into ‘Get Tragic’, a record seething with all the resentment, self-doubt and control freakery of a soured relationship.
While it lacks the untethered aggression of past efforts, there’s a mean underbelly to tracks like ‘Beverly’ and ‘Howl’ that makes up for this. Rampant synthesisers (Carter wrote much of it with a broken arm) don’t always gel with their unique bratty racket, but when they do you can’t discount the possibility that this combustible partnership will stick it out for the long haul.