Vehicle rewire guitar pop history on modern eccentric single “Escalators”

“‘Escalators’ is a song that exists in its own imaginary musical landscape,” says Michael Cable, lead singer of the rising rock band. Doubling down, “Our music rejects most of the dominant British indie music of the past 20 years, and lives in an alternate reality where only our influences exist. I don’t think any good band writes with anybody else in mind.” The wrung-out humor, the insistence that everything stopped being good in the world right around when they were born, and the sniffing at the idea of fitting the norm; it’s all adding up to sound quite like a modern British band that very much fits the norm. With “Escalators”, or any of Vehicle’s work, however, the contrarian claims quickly meet reality. “Escalators” is, while warming the ears with a crumbly and familiar nostalgia, a bit of a misfit wherever it may roam. There’s the unmetered, newborn demo quality to its loose pacing. The background corrugated metal ruffle, sounding like a scene in 1986’s Labyrinth, where Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah Williams is swimming through an antique junkyard. Then there’s rusted neon guitar lines that believably emulate the erratic blinking of faulty Christmas tree lights; the punkish vocal...