BRITISH SEA POWER: DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC? (2008)
1) All In It; 2) Lights Out
For Darker Skies; 3) No Lucifer; 4) Waving Flags; 5) Canvey Island; 6) Down On
The Ground; 7) A Trip Out; 8) The Great Skua; 9) Atom; 10) No Need To Cry; 11)
Open The Door; 12) We Close Our Eyes.
All right, if you want it that much, I'll bite. I do like rock music. But if we're talking
about the bare essentials, the «narrow» definition of rock music, then British
Sea Power is one of the last bands on
Earth to have the right to subtly imply to me that what they are doing is «rock
music». Heck, I don't even think of Bruce Springsteen as «rock music», no
matter what Jon Landau might tell us. True rock music is covered with dust on Earth,
not skyrocketing towards Heaven, which is where Yan and Hamilton have set their
sights.
Not that they don't have a right to; it's just
that the album title really rubs me the wrong way, much as if someone had the
ingenious idea to release an Andrew Lloyd Webber collection entitled From Cats, Trains and Phantoms to Ambiguous
Argentinian Women: Greatest Classical Hits. Yes, BSP's third album is even
more loud and epic than its second.
But it doesn't mean that it is any more related to the quintessential spirit of
«rock music» than its predecessor. Nor does it mean that it is a better album,
for that matter. It is much worse, on all sides.
Supposedly what happened here is the
inevitable. Praised by critics for all the wrong things — the volume, the
scale, the soulfulness, the verbal intelligence, etc. — instead of the right thing, a.k.a. musical creativity,
British Sea Power became convinced that they were the UK equals of Arcade Fire, and that, as long as they stuck
with their form, they should no longer be under pressure to seek for more
substance. In fact, they became so stuck on preserving and polishing the form
that they even went to Canada to work with Arcade Fire's producer for a while
(the album overall has at least three producers and was recorded all over the
world, although the stylistics is so coherent that it does not really show).
And so the indie trap closed in on them.
For me, there is one big difference between Open Season and Rock Music: the cloud of «bored hatred» that eventually dissipated
after a few listens to the first of these never opened up on the second. Why?
Most likely — because the melodies have become even more generic, more stereotypical,
more dispensible. They do throw in a little extra dosage of punky scraping and
distortion, but it is still not enough to install a firm «rock bite» into
fillerish tunes like ʽA Trip Outʼ or ʽLights Out For Darker Skiesʼ (whose
rhythm appropriates Blondie's ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ and turns it into something
much more serious and much less exciting). Nor does it excuse them for such
obvious Arcade Fire steals as ʽWaving Flagsʼ, which tries to pocket the drive
and spirit of ʽNo Cars Goʼ but forgets to sew on a hook of its own.
Even worse, their «atmospheric» numbers are
becoming even more yawn-inducing than they used to be. ʽThe Great Skuaʼ, a
beauty-oriented instrumental number, gets by through sheer exclusive loudness,
echo, and wail of overdubs; if we're talking seabirds, Fleetwood Mac's
ʽAlbatrossʼ originally achieved much more with much less. And the closing
eight «psychedelic» minutes of ʽWe Close Our Eyesʼ, brave as they are, are a
pointless mess of silence, white noise, annoying organ ambience, and a
wall-of-sound coda which is completely wasted because all of the rest of this
album already had the same wall of
sound — try as they might, they just cannot make this conclusion sound more «EPIC» than everything else on
here.
Like any such album, Rock Music is probably not a complete waste of time, but the amount
of time spent on sorting out the few tasty grains is quite disproportional to
the size of these grains. ʽAtomʼ has some curious dynamics to it, alternating
moments of silence and all-out loudness so that one gets to appreciate the
relative value of each a little better. ʽNo Need To Cryʼ, as the only relaxed, quiet
ballad on the album, presents a comforting change of pace and a few subtle emotional
pinches on the senses that, I think, actually work better than the incessant
tempestuous assault on said senses throughout the rest of the album — enough
already!
But my major disappointment is with the guitar
sound: other than on one or two tracks (ʽDown On The Groundʼ might be a particularly
good exception), the little colorful power-poppy phrases that helped the
material on Open Season so much are
almost entirely gone now. It's almost as if they consciously sacrificed their
best abilities for the sakes of Absolute
Power. Now everything is in the vein of ʽNo Luciferʼ — a never-ending
high-pitched plink-plink-plink set against an equally monotonous distorted
chunk-chunk-chunk, with no individuality whatsoever. In other words, a
masterful shortcut towards an irate thumbs down, which I am happy/sad to provide.
One more indie nightmare.
Check "Do You Like Rock Music?" (MP3) on Amazon
No Lucifer at least nicely shows why loud rock (OK, let me be generous and call it hardrock) nééds riffs, preferably with intriguing bass lines added. If I already think AC/DC boring because of the monotonous bass play, how do you think I'll judge My Lucifer?
ReplyDeleteAs for the wall of sound thingy, try Shostakovitch' Seventh or Thirteenth Symphony. Blows those British guys away.