Tuesday 19 July 2011

Who will make the next Great British Rock Album?

The Horrors could be poised to move into anthemic mode. But given the fate of their predecessors, should they bother?

A British band reaches its third or fourth album. They have become a minor fixture on the national scene ? their identity is assured, their audience is loyal. The critics ? initially lukewarm, perhaps ? have come to regard them with fondness. It's time for a statement. The pace of their music becomes statelier, the lyrics more universal, the production glossier. A string section hovers around the studio, perhaps. Sky Sports producers prick up their ears. The arena circuit stands ready. The band, it's now clear, are making a Great British Rock Album.

The first Great British Rock Album I really noticed was the Manic Street Preachers' Everything Must Go. The Great British Rock Album always comes with a narrative ? the story of a journey from idiosyncrasy to popular acclaim, with setbacks on the way ? and the Manics' story was particularly poignant and strong. So much so that the record's success seemed sui generis ? but then, a year later, the Verve's Urban Hymns came along. This had a different storyline ? that of success snatched from the jaws of strife ? but its sound was similarly vast and swayable and it appealed to much the same crowd. The last decade brought further examples ? Snow Patrol's Final Straw, Elbow's The Seldom Seen Kid ? coming from different directions musically but each trading in a kind of soul-searching bigness. And for precedents, all you have to do is cast your mind back to the 1980s, when Simple Minds transformed themselves into arena rockers and Echo and the Bunnymen presented the lush, ponderous Ocean Rain as simply "the best album ever made".

So where's the next Great British Rock Album coming from? The Horrors' enjoyable Skying, out this week, may not be it, but they do sound poised to make one. Whether they should or not is another matter: when Skying reaches for the windswept and epic it starts to drag, with the band's knack for rhythm (more obvious on their earlier, krautrock-influenced material) falling off as the pace slackens. There's definitely enough noise and oddness around the edges to keep things interesting, but also enough anthemic straining from singer Faris Badwan to suggest that the Horrors' trajectory leads straight to the arena.

The bands I've been mentioning didn't start off with a great deal in common ? individually they traded in scrappy pop-punk, cosmic psychedelia, bedsit indie, or gothy psychobilly. Their individual roads to making a Great British Rock Album have been ones of artistic development and progression. But at the same time it does feel as though British bands often end up progressing in one particular direction ? and that sweeping arena rock has an irresistible lure for them. Why is that ? and is there anything wrong with it?

Some of what looks like progress is probably simple scaling up ? groups have access to more studio time, better equipment and more resources and their music stretches to fill the available space. But there's also a particular aesthetic that much of this music reaches for. The ubiquity of it on sports highlights reels is no accident. Sport now is presented simultaneously as a huge communal experience and a series of soapy individual struggles: the goals of Rooney are interventions in his personal storyline as much as contributions to his team. That fits well with modern British rock and its combination of scale and introspection ? the voice at the centre of a Coldplay or Snow Patrol song tends to sound querulous and lonely amidst the bluster and waving lighters. The personal and the communal hit you at the same time, so the music feels at once grand and meaningful.

The only problem is that Great British Rock Albums don't stand up all that well. They might feature one undeniable track ? A Design for Life or Bittersweet Symphony ? but the trade-off is generally the sacrifice of a band's more unique or intriguing qualities in pursuit of mid-paced platitudes. They can also be dead ends ? the band might have progressed to reach this point but once they hit it, the wheels start spinning: the post-breakthrough careers of Simple Minds, Snow Patrol, the Verve's Richard Ashcroft and the Manic Street Preachers are all characterised by inertia. British bands have always had a taste for the anthemic ? you could trace it back to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, or even the Beatles' Hey Jude ? but it's a dangerous one, and the hangover can be fearful.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/jul/14/british-rock-album-the-horrors

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