Everything Everything – Man Alive
Review by Jack Foley
IT’S ironic that the PR for Everything Everything proclaims that the hotly-tipped new foursome aren’t here to make life easy… given that this highly anticipated debut LP turns out to be a vaguely annoying dud.
By their own admission, Jonathan, Jeremy, Mike and Alex exist to ‘challenge every knee-jerk convention of indie rock and dance on the grave of pointless retrogression’.
That is to say, in Jeremy’s words: “We’ve never been comfortable with the indie tag. If it’s Girls Aloud or Slint, it doesn’t matter – if we like it we’ll listen to it and work out what makes it good.
“There are hundreds of years of amazing music to draw on. Why place restrictions on yourself? We belong to a generation that was too young to buy into Britpop fully, so we’ve had no single significant pop cultural movement to throw our lot in with.”
Hence, Everything Everything subvert musical genre expectation by fusing three part harmonies with scalding post-punk guitars, floor-filling bass lines with syncopated rhythms and lyrics about everything from high-school massacres to R&B lotharios musing on their lot in a post-apocalyptic wilderness.
Occasionally, this creates an appealing sound. More often, though, it grates. The mix is as all over the place as the description sounds. Some will doubtless hail them as the new cool kids (Q and NME are already falling over themselves), but Man Alive left a lot to be desired for this particular reviewer.
First off, the vocals are whiny and forgettable; second, the fusion of genres never really settles into any particular – or likeable – groove; third, the lyrics are nowhere near as intelligent as they pretend to be; and fourth, the 12 songs just seem to go on forever.
A song like Leave The Engine Room begins with a whine and a ghostly synth, and goes nowhere very ponderously, while Photoshop Handsome has an unappealing DIY sound merged with thumping beats and punky guitars.
Two For Nero has irritating vocal harmonies and a tendency to repeat lyrics in case we didn’t get them the first time and Come Alive Diana adopts a post-punk energy that feels a little belated (even if the falsetto chorus harks back to Blur at times).
The somewhat pretentious nature of the whole endeavour is best summed up by irritating final track Weights, which presumptuously assumes “I know how it ends” over and over.
There is the occasional track that appeals (Suffragete Suffragete and Schoolin’ to name but two), but in the main this is a disappointing album from an act who are rapidly becoming over-rated.
Download picks: Schoolin’, Suffragette Suffragette, Final Form
Track listing:
Disagree with you on most of this. I usually judge an act by a balance of album content to live performance. on both scores for me (catching them nice and early at leeds festival) they come up trumps. but i do like the vocalist’s oddball singing…so that puts me at an advantage there.
Ryan Sep 3 #How someone who writes reviews can so thoroughly miss the genius of this album is quite beyond me. Ignore this rubbish write up and go listen for urself…
tim Sep 10 #I am staggered by this review. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but this review is so far off the mark to be insulting. One listen and I was hooked. What the reviewer perhaps is failing to get is that this is different from everything else we had had for the past 15 / 20 years. Perhaps the difference is too challenging. This band and album breaks the mold. Mark my words there will be EE wanabee and sounds like bands in the next 12 months. In the meantime I think the reviewer should go back to listening to Oasis and Coldplay
andrew Sep 15 #