BRITISH SEA POWER: THE DECLINE OF BRITISH SEA POWER (2003)
1) Men Together Today; 2)
Apologies To Insect Life; 3) Favours In The Beetroot Fields; 4) Something
Wicked; 5) Remember Me; 6) Fear Of Drowning; 7) The Lonely; 8) Carrion; 9)
Blackout; 10) Lately; 11) A Wooden Horse; 12*) Childhood Memories; 13*)
Heavenly Waters.
That a band hailing from Brighton, East Sussex,
would want to be known as «British Sea Power» is probably not very surprising.
That it would choose The Decline Of
British Sea Power as the title of its debut album is also nothing to write
home about — after all, British sea power has
been in relative decline over the past century, as every self-respecting
Somalian pirate will tell you. That the topics, moods, and melodies of the
album will, for the most part, have nothing whatsoever to do with British sea
power, and, frankly speaking, not much to do with Britain itself, is a bit more
remarkable. But not before you start thinking about it. Come on now, do you really expect a group called British
Sea Power to sing about British sea power? What is this — Admiral Nelson's
Lonely Hearts Club Band?
As a matter of fact, there are times — quite a
few times, to be sure — when British Sea Power sound so much like Arcade Fire that the temptation to brand them as a
bunch of second-tier rip-off con artists grows sky-high. Except the glitch is
that British Sea Power actually were there first: The Decline came out one year prior to Funeral, and it is almost certain that both bands were developing
and polishing their personae completely unaware of each other's existence. The
fact that it happened that way simply reflects a «convergence» pattern —
apparently, there was an intuitively felt demand for this kind of music on
both sides of the ocean, and someone, somewhere, somehow simply had to oblige
the spirit of the times.
Basically, British Sea Power play this big,
arena-esque, pathos-soaked, heaven-bound type of art-rock where you need loud,
but simple riffs, lots of echo, some blue-eyed soul in your occasionally
off-key singing, and a post-post-modern attitude where dense, heavily
intellectualized lyrics are delivered with an air of the utmost emotional
sincerity. If you can believe that a song may begin with lines like "Oh
Fyodor you are the most attractive man I know / Your Russian heart is strong
and has been bleeding for too long" and
reflect strong, unsimulated feeling from the bottom of one's (British) heart,
read on. If you cannot, this band is not for you.
Of course, this does not mean that you will
never understand what British Sea Power is all about if you haven't read a
single line of Dostoyevsky. Unlike Arcade Fire, British Sea Power take very
good care to make most of their lyrics more nebulous than the proverbial
Brighton fog. Nothing here is about the lyrics as much as it is about attitude:
The Decline Of British Sea Power is
a ponderous, pretentious lament on the state of things as they are — old ways
and lifestyles crumbling, and new ones not being satisfactory. All the complex
words and ambiguous imagery are only there to showcase the band's intelligence:
if you want to earn the right to complain about the fates of the world, you
have to prove your knowledge of the world. In particular, they may have read some Dostoyevsky. It's
always useful to read some Dostoyevsky if you want to learn the proper art of
complaining about things, anyway.
But no amount of complaining is going to be
acceptable if it is stored in faulty song containers, of course. And from a
sheer melodic point of view, none of these songs are particularly interesting.
There are some fast punk-influenced rockers (one of which, ʽFlavours In The
Beetroot Fieldsʼ, clocks in at a hardcore-honoring 1:18), some traditional drone-based
shuffles, and some basic Britpop creations with a pretty Kinks stamp on them.
If any of the riffs, courtesy of resident guitarists Neil Hamilton Wilkinson
and Martin Noble, turn out to be memorable, it is mostly because you have heard
them all — or their immediate prototypes — before.
This leaves the band's leader and principal
songwriter, Scott Wilkinson, better known as «Yan», as our major hope. And he
is appropriately suitable: very far from a great singer, in many ways, in fact,
uncannily similar to Arcade Fire's Win Butler (same tendency to either
«whisper» or «screech» in the exact same range), but quite expressive — British
Sea Power's main modes of action are «dreaminess» and «despair», so the
bandleader whispers when he is being dreamy and screeches when he is being
desperate: what could be wrong with that? Furthermore, his vocal melodies
often succeed where the instrumental ones do not, being transformed into
atmospheric instrumental accompaniment.
Thus, ʽFear Of Drowningʼ, the band's first
single, is mostly memorable for its slow crescendo, reflected mainly in the
vocals — culminating in the chorus ("...we'll swim from these island
shores til there's a little fear of drowning, a little fear of drowning...").
It's a nice enough projection of one's own insecurity onto a simple musical
canvas, and the lyrical metaphor is fresh and engaging, if not particularly
flattering for good old England. The second
single, ʽRemember Meʼ, is the album's loudest and angriest rocker, on which
Yan exorcises his Sussex demons in a voice that precisely averages David
Bowie and Bruce Springsteen (if you thought the theatrical aristocratism of the
former and the theatrical working-class straightforwardness of the latter could
never be matched, this song transparently proves the opposite).
As the album progresses, it moves ever farther
away from loud distorted guitar rock and into the realm of loud folk- and
Britpop-based 21st century art-rock: ʽThe Lonelyʼ and ʽCarrionʼ, also released
as singles, exemplify this «softer», but no less «epic» streak of the band's
creativity, and both are decent, but not exactly heartbreaking anthems for
pre-specified market shares of their generations (well, they could be heartbreaking, I guess, for all
those youngsters who never gave themselves the trouble of listening to the
band's major influences).
They do take a serious risk on ʽLatelyʼ, a
track that runs for 14 minutes and, in structure only, reveals yet another
influence — Neil Young: starting out as a slow, pompous, and, frankly, rather
boring rock-grinder, it then allows itself to be taken into uncharted waters,
then return back to shore, share the plunder, and go back into uncharted waters
again. As stoner rock / neo-psychedelic jammers, these guys would probably get
something like a «B-» from me — competence without excitement — but the
gesture can be appreciated for boldness' sake, if not exactly understood.
Although there is a fun moment of
self-irony somewhere in there, when after a particularly bawdy passage, Yan,
distorting his voice, starts asking questions like "do you like my
megalithic Rock? do you like my prehistoric Rock? do you like my Teutonic Rock?
do you like my hygienic Rock?» Well, I'm not sure if I like it, Yan, but I do
like all those nice words you're using. Thanks for asking the question, anyway.
All in all, I do like this album, and maybe, in
the absence of Arcade Fire, it could have become a favorite from the last
decade; the way things are, The Decline
Of British Sea Power is more of a trans-Atlantic precursor for things to
come. But it does have its own troubles and its own sorrows that could not be
shared by our Canadian friends, so it's not like the emergence of Funeral makes these here songs
completely redundant. In short, a tepid, but mildly respectful thumbs up
with growth potential. But be warned — the album really sounds nothing like its title would suggest. No sea shanties
for you, and no trendy, haughty, foul-mouthed Britpop, either.
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