modern music review

SuperPop

"Doors lead to other doors. Roads lead to other roads."
(from Skipping on The Associates' 1982 album Sulk)

What follows is an intellectual fantasy, an alternative version of reality which doesn’t exist. There is no movement built round the bands whose extraordinary nature we are about to explore. They no more sound the same than The Clash, The Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks did in the late 1970s or Oasis, Pulp and Blur in the mid-1990s. And who’d call them a movement? This article is merely an idea about ideas.

Lush, inventive, clever, elaborate, extravagant... when jack of all trades Fyfe Dangerfield and his idiosyncratic colleagues in Guillemots began work on the follow-up to Through The Windowpane, 2006’s Mercury Prize-nominated orchestral jazz-tinged indie album, he must have been thinking - now I’ll show them!

Bollywood, urban r’n'b, disco, rock, pop, electro - strings, pings and all things - Red turned out to be an even more ambitious genre-bending barrage than its predecessor, though, bizarrely, all this complexity was devoted to delivering one simple thing - pop.

Despite opening single Get Over It going top 20 in March 2008 and the album itself hitting number nine, Guillemots’ most recent efforts didn’t linger long in the charts and the music world failed to tremble in their wake.

It’s a similar tale with TV On The Radio, The Week That Was, Mystery Jets, The Klaxons, and the granddaddy of them all, The Flaming Lips, all critically-acclaimed acts whose often unorthodox music is laced with a love of orthodox hooklines. The more these flamboyant magpies and melodic mavericks desire success, the more success rejects them and nothing, ironically, is more romantic than rejection.

Treated most cruelly, perhaps, has been prodigiously talented peacock boy child, Patrick Wolf. Musician, arranger, producer, artist, with sleeve notes boasting his own stylist, the exotic mix of instrumentation and musical styles mastered by this flamboyant man for all seasons on albums such as 2007’s The Magic Position refutes any potential charge of campness with a delicious pith and punch. His love of all things 1980s in pop music (and beyond), all that talent and ambition, all that cleverness, hasn’t brought him commercial success, however. Building a song round a synth line or electro beat, driving it forward with a dancefloor bassline, may be the foundation stones of many of the acts which excite us today but it’s not the whole story; otherwise this article would be about The Killers and Little Boots. And it isn’t that obvious.

So what we are talking about? Strictly -speaking it isn't Electro pop, though there is a link and an overlap. Far too predictable, though both MGMT and Passion Pit take it and twist it in unorthodox directions. And we’re not talking about acts where the avant-garde outweighs the pop, so let’s put aside Deerhoof and Animal Collective, though they too, are a good sign of the encouragingly mixed-up times we live in. We can also rule out those songs where it’s a case of romance, pure and simple; nothing is pure and simple in the modern music this article is seeking to grasp. Life isn’t as straightforward as those songs where the lushness of melody and strings is completely in the ascendancy; Rufus Wainwright, The Last Shadow Puppets or before them Echo & The Bunnymen (The Killing Moon) or The Verve (History), even.

So what is this article about? Being anti-genre in principle, if not always practice, we’re loathe to resort to words like the following: Prog Pop. Orchestral Pop. Psych Pop. Big Pop. Adult Pop. Beatnik Pop. Super Pop. Loathe to do it but obliged by the limitations of language, the need to generalise, the need to nail it down. What captures the zing and the energy best while leaving the definition wooly enough to encompass the complexity of acts such as Guillemots, TV on the Radio or Patrick Wolf is probably ‘Super Pop’.

Not that the ‘Super Pop’ bands attuned to our philosophical agenda sound exactly the same, which two bands ever do?

And there are usually tell-tale signs that ‘Super Pop’ is in the air, aside from a penchant for non-stop hooklines, a preference for keyboards and synths over guitars and a dangling sign saying “intelligent individuals at work.” Look out for overly-loud percussion, radical changes in time signature or musical style, the use of unfashionable instruments like sax! Horns! Marimbas! Vibraphones! ooutbreaks of falsetto vocals, and lots of aaahhhs and doos and wooahs.

Mystery Jets and The Klaxons, both London-based, are the most direct of the Super Pop acts, though where the former are reflective and down to earth the latter energetically race towards the fantastical.

With more in common with the clinical, serialist pop of the High Llamas than the effervescent pop of Patrick Wolf, The Week That Was are more intellectually rigorous and obtuse, brothers Peter and David Brewis's mathematical approach to song construction and emotional coolness placing them on the outer fringes of Super Pop rather than at its hothouse centre.

Birmingham’s Guillemots, despite their command of a thousand musical approaches from jazz to Bhangra, often sound on the verge of losing control. New York’s TV On The Radio are just the opposite and more soul of sound. 2006‘s Return To Cookie Mountain may have piled up layers and textures in a rollicking stew of apocalyptical fears but, last year‘s Dear Science album was a smoother affair, serving up soulful kaleidoscope of a hundred subtle influences.

Despite these differences, Super Pop bands share a fundamentally similar mindset which belongs firmly to the the first decade of 21^st century. If their approach to creation is surprisingly ambitious and complex for pop acts, it merely reflects their view on life as a whole. Their lyrics show they recognise the world outside but remain romantics at heart. TV On The Radio believe in miracles in an age of violence and decay (Golden Age). Guillemots’ songs are obsessed with sky and the clouds and battling with a real world that’s not too much fun (Cockateels).

Super Pop is where reality meets romance. As such pop for pop’s sake is out of the question. Super Pop is the sound of subtle thoughts forcefully expressed, melodic but a bit overwrought.

Like the manic depressive cocaine cabaret of The Associates (and those parts of the David Bowie albums Young Americans, Heroes and Super Monsters which influenced them) Super Pop likes to seduce you with the glamour of pop while unsettling the listener with an unpredictable palette of sounds which suggest moments of wonder are still possible.

That’s why the glory of Super Pop often comes in unexpected moments when bands like The Guillemots upset the pop applecart they have so artfully created. Moments when the patient bass purr, gentle synth hum and intimate vocals of the early verses of Don’t Look Down (The Guillemots) is interrupted after 2 minutes and 27 seconds by an explosion of drums and shouted vocals, before ending in a wild blizzard of drum n bass-style rhythm. Moments when the upbeat falsetto and scratchy funk rhythms of the verse and understated chorus of The Mystery Jet’s Veiled in Grey are suddenly hijacked at the 2.51min sec mark by a piercingly wonky synth pulling out the song’s underlying passion amid its reflections on the mundane nature of personal tragedy.

Or TV On The Radio’s Shout Me Out, more rhythm and percussion-based than either of the above, in love with the subtleties of soul just as The Week That Was are in love with the subtleties of marimba and violin minimalism, cool and calm until an outbreak of passion at the 1.45min mark where an injection of pace, guitars and echoed “woah” vocals and propels the track towards a frenzied battle between dub reggae beats and layers of rock guitar and feedback.

Despite the state of the world, the lies, the hunger, the greed, the violence and lack of hope raised in so many of these acts‘ lyrics, Superpop has joy in its heart. Its secret strength is to combine cynicism with the optimism of youth. Rather than regurgitating that old boy meets girl formula it asks the bigger question where can love reside in a world of woes?

Like the Beat Generation poets of 1950s America, the answer is “anywhere” the listener wants it to be, though it doesn’t pretend it doesn’t have have a fight on its hands. In an era of alienation, apathy and disengagement, the Super Pop bands aren't embarrassed to show they care. Super Pop is brash, brilliant and, occasionally, beautiful.

It sees the dark night but it won’t go quietly into it.

Graham Chalmers