Stereo Jealousy

Maxïmo Park: Quicken The Heart
Released 11th May 2009
Warp

I liked Maxïmo Park. I thought the debut album was a pretty damn good record, certainly deserving of being on the hallowed Warp label. Second album was a little bit off colour, but packing enough punchy tracks to bear out repeated listens. Shame then that Quicken The Heart continues that downward trend – this time lacking any songs of flair or interest. The opening four or so tracks pass by without hook or standout. Sadly the band seems to have taken their always-present “big sound” leanings and replicated it over the course of an album. Gone are the stop-start moments that made tracks like Apply Some Pressure so exhilirating; replaced with leaden words and single paced tunes. There’s only a couple of tracks that lifted the monotony, the glittering Calm and darkly raw Roller Disco Dreaming. At times it comes across as lightweight as an 80s synthpop album, only lacking the immediacy and subtlety; all flash no bang. Despite the immediacy there is no pop hook; for all the stadium sound, there’s no shout-along chorus. This places the album in no-man’s land, passing the listener by and leaving nothing behind.

Rating:

Calm (mp3)
The Kids Are Sick Again (Video)

Band Site

Myspace

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Buy Quicken The Heart

Photo: Stuart Leech

Mercury Rev
Snowflake Midnight
V2

Rating:

Mercury Rev have traced a strange trajectory in the decade following their first masterpiece, Deserter’s Songs. 2001’s All Is Dream was excellent, a fragile collection of songs draped in beautiful arrangements. Four years in the making, its follow-up The Secret Migration was a relative failure. That fragility had turned to lead, thick instrumentation drowning any notion of tune or subtlety.

Snowflake Midnight is every bit the return to the success of 1998, albeit in a totally different form. Gone is the echo-ing Americana, and to the fore comes electronic soundscaping; loops and glitches. The change in sound is probably tied to the change in writing process, faced with creative block they turned to random note generators and online effects libraries. The result is an inorganic but beautifully natural record.

The marriage between Donahue’s trademark vocals and the new guitar-free Rev is a happy one, the songs float past, seeming both to evolve and endlessly repeat. There’s plenty of range here too, with the mood changing across and within tracks. Album highlight, People Are So Unpredictable is the best example. The track warps over its near seven-minute length from a delicate ‘curious flower’ to a devastating run of drums, reminiscent of M83’s cinematics, and then back again to a looping piano.

The band still inhabit the same universe as previously, this is no Rev-olution. Tracks like the superb Dream Of A Young Girl As A Flower and opener Snowflake In A Hot World are Mercury Rev alright, just with a brilliant electric sheen. Perhaps the band see this as a return to their early experimental work. If so, then they have done a stunning job of melding experiment to melody.

Mercury Rev – Senses On Fire

By registering on the Mercury Rev website, you can get an instrumental ’second disc’ of Snowflake Midnight, called Strange Attractor. The band are quoted as saying that tracks swapped places between the two albums, so the quality should be just as high. It’s in my download queue as I type…