British Sea Power
‘Open Season’ (Rough Trade)
(April '05)
Here, the Great White Hopes of Indie-Rock
try to follow up their so-ironically titled ‘The Decline of British
Sea Power’. In the finely-designed sleeve of this second album,
there’s a quotation which suggests that this band are happy to
fail if they do so with wit and feeling:
“To spend our days betting on three-legged horses with beautiful
names.”
It’s never easy to follow a superb debut, but where this effort
falls, it always does so with grace and wonder.
BSP are adept at crafting mysterious songs. A break-up song by this band is as likely to be about icebergs as about human relationships, while chief singer Yan has a wide-eyed, open-mouthed delivery, as if amazed by everything. “We found God in a Wiltshire field” claims the album’s opening track, corking single ‘It Ended on an Oily Stage’. The band show an admiration both for the finer points of nature, and for the language used to express it: “I love your iridescent sheen” declares the chorus of ‘Be Gone’. Is it a love song, a call to arms or nature study? It’s college-rock for librarians!
The ambitious mood is often reflected in music of scope and grandeur. This means a chiming hook paired with pretty distortion and a warmly synthesized background. At times, it has also meant a wish to shout and scream in a manner not heard since Black Francis wore short trousers, but the Pixies strain has perhaps been mined to perfection, and here the band have calmed down a little. ‘Please Stand Up’ is a fine example of epic pop for a bite-size world, its own advice followed by the mantra of ‘North Hanging Rock’, a gentle soundscape which encourages us, “drape yourself in greenery, become part of the scenery.”
With all such soft accessibility, there are moments which don’t quite live up to the band’s history. ‘Like A Honeycomb’, a meditation on decay, could be compared to Talking Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’, but as covered by Coldplay. If not pulled along by the pounding chorus, one could think it a sadly humdrum lyric compared with the verse. Similarly, ‘How Will I Ever Find My Way Home?’ is a good enough question but the song could be any young band playing old garage rock. It’s not a bad song, but its twee wailing doesn’t have what makes BSP special. More ambitious is the closer ‘True Adventures’, but it treads the fine line between apocalyptic post-rock (Lift to Experience, Do Make Say Think) and the sort of progressive nonsense you’d associate with Pink Floyd. ‘Oh Larsen B’ is closest to the adventurous joy of early releases, with a bassline which sounds stolen from some classic Northern Soul record, and with a grand instrumental climax which rivals Pixies' ‘Debaser’ for length - but which might preclude release as a nightclub floor-filler.
A band will always run into trouble if they depart too far from their roots; and if they stick too close to a proven formula. On the whole, ‘Open Season’ succeeds in its own form of compromise, and should satisfy every BSP acolyte. For the musical majority, any song that departs from the usual subjects of love and lust will appear breathtakingly original, whether it has a banjo or not; and this album deserve a wider audience, for beyond their strange military-industrial name, stage gimmicks and lyrical concerns, British Sea Power possess frankly killer tunes. I’d still say that this band are the most interesting and exciting of the current old-fashioned guitar brigade, and if this LP doesn’t have a rocker as catchy as ‘Remember Me’, at least there are fewer opportunities to shake one’s fist in sonic majesty on an embarrassed dance floor.
Also, the album has lots of sampled birdsong, and even the sound of gulls. How strangely open-minded, and how damn cool.
