As a basic premise, the idea of your reviewer being moved to tears by a love song to a collapsing ice shelf sounds pretty damn unlikely, doesn't it? Yet the epic 'Oh Larsen B' from BRITISH SEA POWER'S previous album 'Open Season' did just that and indeed its' parent album's winningly esoteric mix of odes to everything from insomnia to discovering God in Wiltshire fields set to the kind of cavernous, anthemic sonic vistas not heard since Echo & The Bunnymen crashed and burned towards the end of the 1980s suggested true greatness was coming this way.
And the good news is that with their third album, 'Do You Like Rock Music?', Brighton's finest junior home guard guerrilla troupe deliver in spades. Recorded - curiously - in a brace of on-location settings all beginning with 'C' (Canada, Czech Republic, Cornwall)often in the middle of snowstorms and with Graham Sutton (Bark Psychosis, Jarvis Cocker) at the controls, it's another set of epically-inclined, ecologically-tainted songs which - this time round - surely can't fail to elevate BSP onto much larger (oily) stages. Should they so desire.
Besides, while we're on the subject of topics beginning with 'C', then we should surely add the word 'confidence', because it's only the most audacious of bands who would (and could) choose to open their album with a massed choir 'overture' ('All In It') and follow it up with a thunderous, 6-minute plus epic as BSP do with Yan's magnificent 'Lights Out For Darker Skies'. You want skyscraping guitars? Dense atmospherics? Yearning choruses? 'Lights Out...' has 'em all, not to mention eerily prophetic lyrics ("Hell and high water won't stop us now/ the future's twisted, righteousness is coming back around") and the kind of ambition I remember Suede being villified for circa 'Dog Man Star'. Let's hope that fate doesn't befall 'Do You Like Rock Music?', because it deserves to be embraced immediately.
Crucially, the ambition - and execution -rarely fall short after this initial stunning broadside, with the band's two principal writers, Yan and Hamilton, both stepping heroically into the breach. Yan leads the way with the anthemic grandeur of new single 'Waving Flags', which touches on the newly-enlarged Europe ("oh welcome in, cross the Carpathians/ oh welcome in, across the Stadion/ and we won't fail, not with Czech ecstacy") and I assume dates from their Czech sessions. He then follows it up with arguably the album's two key tracks in 'Atom' and the stunning 'Canvey Island'. The 'told you so' aspect of 'Atom"s self-explanatory lyric ("when you get down to the sub-atomic part of it/ that's when it breaks you know, that's when it falls apart") is hard to deny in a society struggling to combat climate change, though the idea of jumping around like an unreconstructed loon to a chorus that goes "Oh caveat emptor! open the atom's core!" also makes perfect sense as soon as you experience it.
|
It's great, but possibly bettered by the biblically cautionary 'Canvey Island' which relates to both the floods which overwhelmed the island back in 1953 and also the tantalising possibility of many such life-threatening events in the now and near future. Indeed, it's impossible not to be touched by the emotional pull of the chorus ("don't you think it's strange you know, the way it all works out?/ brace yourself for storms and summer droughts") or marvel at the sub-atomic sonic storm BSP whip up to ram the point home.
Not wanting to be outdone, bassist Hamilton's also shaping up in the songwriting stakes these days and he spoils us with a brace of belters too. Initially, the most arresting of his tunes are the seething rockers like the stomping good-versus-evil themes of 'No Lucifer' ("malevolence or good?/ is that what the future holds?") and the muscular 'A Trip Out': which as glimpses of impending apocalypses go both sound pretty damn exhilarating. However, Hamilton also provides us with some equally crucial moments of respite in the thoughtful 'No Need To Cry' and the excellent ''Open The Door', which not only proffers some spot-on lyrical invective ("I'm not afraid of the big black bear/ only humans make me scared") but marries it with a gentle honey of a tune. And talking of poignant tunes, guitarist Noble also gets in the act with his mournfully hymnal elegy to an extinct species via the moving 'The Great Skua.'
All of which conspires to ensure that this anything but 'difficult' third album is BSP's best - and most consistent - set yet. Yes, most of us need minesweepers to traverse the confused waters of rock these days, but were your reviewer to be asked 'Do You Like Rock Music?', he'd still be compelled to answer in the affirmative if British Sea Power remain the vanguards of the fleet.
(www.britishseapower.co.uk)
|
