British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
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Artist: British Sea PowerEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2008-02-12
Music Label: ROUGH TRADE
Soundtracks:
- All In It
- Lights Out For Darker Skies
- No Lucifer
- Waving Flags
- Canvey Island
- Down On The Ground
- A Trip Out
- The Great Skua
- Atom
- No Need To Cry
- Open The Door
- We Close Our Eyes
Free Music Notes for Do You Like Rock Music?
Free Music Review: British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music? 9/10
Hit: 5 Stars
The glory days of England's naval superiority have long since passed, the epic colonial tradition lionized in films such as Master and Commander and demonized in The Pirates of the Caribbean saga having lost quite a bit of its fame since the first World War. Whether this is because of the lack of serious ocean warfare in recent memory or the British dismantling of their former empire, it doesn't seem to have worried the people of that innovative island country. Since 2000, they have found a new way to reassert their prominence: through the power of rock `n roll, particularly that of the eccentric, genre-bending brand.
From their formation, British Sea Power have seemed to be a band caught up in their own myth and pretension, releasing their debut album with the cover of a mock history book and the title The Decline of British Sea Power. A bewildering blend of the Arcade Fire and the Pixies for the hip, Encyclopedia Britannica-reading set, they put on shows in Cornish mines in giant bear costumes and went by one-word monikers such as Noble and Hamilton.
Thank God for the music, then. If listeners were able to get around their graduate thesis themes and lyrics, such as their love song to an Antarctica ice shelf on "Oh Larsen B" or their offhanded mention of the French Revolutionary calendar from their second album Open Season, they found a band willing to experiment in ways that few modern bands have dared.
British Sea Power's third and best album asks a simple question and proceeds to offer twelve astounding reasons to say "yes." Running the gamut from post-punk, angular rock to choral, Gregorian chant-influenced soaring melodies to sweeping, grandiose stadium rock, the band combines the disparate sounds from their first two albums into a whole that makes for perhaps their first thematically coherent record.
The album opens with "All In It," characterized by a simple marching drum pattern and vocalist Yan gently singing with an accompanying organ and a female choir before exploding into a shrieking guitar line and amplified feedback. Throughout it all, Yan continues to repeat the title of the song and advises the listener to "close their eyes," perhaps in order to more fully appreciate what is to come.
"Lights Out for Darkier Skies" is an instant classic, starting off with a ripping drum fill and anchored by a pulsating, melodic guitar line that calls to mind their countrymen in indie-rock outfit Razorlight. The song is six and a half minutes long and diverges halfway through into an U2-esque stadium-sized climax complete with call-and-response vocals and a guitar solo.
Do You Like Rock Music? continues to shift between the frenetic punk blast of their debut and the graceful pastoral anthems of Open Season, with some songs veering back and forth within their beginning and end. Future single "No Lucifer" opens with a haunting violin line and then is rudely interrupted by a raucous snare and a crowd of voices shouting "easy!" while Yan ponders, "is that what the future holds? / Kevlar or cherry wood / malevolence or good?"
Up tempo barnburner "Atom" sounds like a song the Strokes lost somewhere in the studio, deceptively beginning with a gentle piano melody before revving up into a frenzied party song with a jaded chorus complaining that "I just don't get it." Yan's vocals and the excellent drum work alone would justify buying the whole album.
The album closes as it began on the epic "Close Your Eyes," eight minutes of ethereal organ and guitar bursts while Yan repeats the lyrics from the beginning of the album. The song is a fitting curtain call, building to a wall-of-sound peak well the band throws everything and the kitchen sink into the production. Literally, the squeaks around the midpoint of the song sound like a plumber fine-tuning his work.
Sure, British Sea Power wear their influences on their sleeve: Yan's vocal stylings call to mind David Bowie, their orchestral approach to the production mirrors that of Canadian counterparts Broken Social Scene, their guitarist seems to have clearly studied the techniques of the Pixies and the Edge, and their penchant for lyrical nonsense and obscure subjects is more Radiohead than Oasis. However, it is what they do with those influences that make them a new and truly exciting band, separating them from the hordes of British rockers assaulting American radio trying to make a buck off of what their new wave predecessors did twenty years ago.
One cannot answer the album's question without seeing both sides of the subject, the good and the bad, the "kevlar and cherry wood." British Sea Power present both, at once pounding the listener with their punk influences while at another cranking up the orchestra and sweeping melodies to show a softer, more poppish side. With their third release the band has distilled these varying sounds into a fresh adventure into musical history and affirms that, hell yes, we do like rock music.
Do You Like Rock Music? Poster
British Sea Power are a four-man indie rock band based in Brighton, England. Their style ranges from the sweeping, often epic, guitar pop sound to the visceral and angular. They have likened their sound to a variety of groups, from The Cure and Pixies. They have most often been compared to Joy Division. This is their third album and it features the singles 'Waving Flags' and 'No Lucifer Critics' The band is comprised of: Yan (Scott Wilkinson) - vocals, guitar Noble (Martin Noble) - guitar, Hamilton (Neil Wilkinson) - bass, vocals, guitar , and Wood (Matthew Wood) - drums. Reviews are 'A masterpiece of epic proportions.'-The Word. 'Ambitious, impressive and genuinely moving-chock full of epic music and seductive melodies! '- Q EMM/Rough Trade. 2008.British Sea Power return with their third and finest full-length. Here they reintegrate the rock with a slew of blistering guitars and unpredictable studio noisemaking worthy of their visceral live performances. Witness fist-pumpers like "No Lucifer" or the Bonzo-styled drumbeat bashed out under a climactic synth-string section on "Waving Flags." Better yet, "Down on the Ground" and "A Trip Out" both feature guitar riffs worthy of the Judas Priest songbook, before they're enveloped in the vast expanse of their accompanying songs. The sound here is raw and spacious. Guitars remain largely drenched in reverb, and various acoustic instruments grace the arrangements, along with various random noises and happy accidents. On "Canvey Island," vocalist Yan describes the fatal 1953 floods on the Thames estuary from the viewpoint of a football fan decrying the loss of memorabilia rather than lives. On "Atom" he decries the "bright but haunted" modern age through the apt metaphor of the split nucleus: "Oh caveat emptor / Open the atom's core." Brainy explorations like that, along with BSP's notoriously clever sense of humor, make the self-conscious title no surprise, but there's really no better way to describe it. This is what rock music can and should be. --Jason Pace
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