Machineries of Joy
– British Sea Power
The British Sea Power experience began with the
cleverly-titled and cleverly-artworked debut album The Decline of British Sea Power in 2003. The songs on said debut were of the
scruffy-indie phenotype, but the band name, the album cover (invoking a
reference tome or an official document of some import,) the intellectually provocative song
titles (example: “Apologies to Insect
Life,”) and the fairly wide-angle musical landscapes were a world of intention
apart. British Sea Power arrived on
Earth wanting a history. From the
get-go, they were a canonical endeavor.
Album number five “Machineries of Joy” makes it clear: endeavor realized. We behold a canon.
The Decline of British
Sea Power was not a head fake. The
songs on second album Open Season were
more accomplished than those on the first, and Open Season’s visual art also aimed higher, looking more like the
flag of a stately province somewhere than a sorted and filed official document
in some forgotten folio.
At the risk of hyperbole:
there are no other bands that do this, or have done it. There are bands that assume their own
greatness, and bands that accomplish prolonged greatness. But very, very few bands claim and maintain
an historical status from birth without crashing spectacularly in a fireball of
pretension. And none of those who have tried
before could have in any way been described as “indie.”
For historical import is not—ever, really: by definition—the domain of those who eschew
the trappings of mass appeal. It
requires warped personal epistemology to make under-produced, genuine-unto-itself
music that is however convinced of its permanent place in time. And intent is not enough here: if the efforts and skill sets fall short, pitfalls
of history-minded indie rock music include both Camp (see: the Decemberists) and Redundancy (see: Jack White.)
The BSP technique behind the endeavor has been a type of
Shop Rock. The music is contemporary—and
never particularly derivative of anything—but never so contemporary as to date
itself or set its own expiration date.
Rather, the technical approaches and the preserved rough edges suggest a
conscious effort at fabrication, as opposed to programming or manufacturing. It was therefore a mild shock that the band
waited until the second track of their third album (“Lights Out for Darker
Skies,” off the sublime Do You Like Rock
Music?) to name-check the torch fuel acetylene.
This is music constructed noisily but lovingly as a type of
craft, and it beats the living crap out of the traditional folk attempts at the
same. To some wonderful and unprecedented
extent, British Sea Power could only have existed since the Industrial
Revolution and could only have thrived in the belly of the Military Industrial
Complex. Stick that in your mandolin.
So: indie but
historical. Created but not
manufactured. Melodic but metallic, muscular
and rough-hewn. As approaches to music
go, this is terrain that is treacherous as a peat bog, and as full of
corpses. And yet the albums keep coming.
Track 1, and the shared album title, do a pretty unambiguous
job of reiterating the fabrication motif:
“Machineries of Joy.” The guitars
are buzzy, and the melody pretty, and lyrics a bit of a curveball. It is us now.
“We are magnificent machineries of joy.”
Traditionally, this has not been the focus of British Sea Power albums,
which can run quite short on navel-gazing and emotional self-examination.
There is, thankfully, no descent into the mirror. The lead track builds in a pastoral manner
relatively classic for BSP songcraft.
Over a minute-and-a-half of layered instrumentation and rolling
beat-establishment passes before we get a vocal, and the chorus doesn’t arrive
until the two minute mark. For fans of
the band, this grandiosity amounts to not much more than the warm embrace of a
dear friend. Five albums in, British Sea
Power have not lost perspective: their
perspective remains utterly widescreen, the listener dwarfed.
By tracks 3 and 5, “Hail Holy Queen,” and “What You Need the
Most” we have re-established the band’s arch-industrial modus operandi. The shuffling tempo of the former, replete
with elegant background vocals, dramatic strings, and a faintly Royal use of
the cymbals; the latter’s immediate invocation of “Pyrex,” whose creation maybe
was the point when society inflected toward wherever, for better or worse, it
is going to end up.
However. The thing
with this band always is: it doesn’t
start and end with potentially cornball references to society and industry—
1)
From “Hail Holy Queen”: “I’m at your feet / I’m at your command /
Hail holy Queen of the sea”
2)
From “What You Need the Most: “It seems to me, obvious really, what you
need the most is your old love, today.”
Sung over a delicate acoustic melody, absent the abrasive
guitars and frequently elaborate instrumentation, stuff like this might be
intolerably stupid. Instead it sounds
like something that has never been done before, and done quite well now.
Pleasingly, the album is at this point only just reaching
full steam. The trio of “Spring Has
Sprung,” “Radio Goddard,” and “A Light Above Descending” are a near-perfect
alchemy of BSP nuance and appealing melody.
They might be the best three-set of songs on any British Sea Power album
to date, and the final two thirds of “Spring Has Sprung” in particular feels
like the band’s high water mark among attempts at fashioning a perfect pop rock
song. It is an unblemished success.
Not all of Machineries
of Joy succeeds, which will shock no one who has listened to prior BSP
albums. These albums typically arrive
with a sizable ballast of chaff—or perhaps more precisely, scrap. “K Hole” is nearly as grating as the Silver
Jews track of the same name. (Artists of indie rock, unite and take heed: please, no more tracks, ever, called “K
Hole.”)
“Loving Animals” pushes the vocals well beyond the very
modest limits of both its lyrics and the singing voice, which is doubly
unsuccessful. Throw in a near-miss of a
melody and a brief horse-hoof sound effect and this one probably doesn’t
graduate to the listener’s permanent digital library. Finally, album closer “When a Warm Wind Blows
Through the Grass” fails to satisfy the intrigue of its nifty title and spooky
first 60 seconds, never paying off the drama of its buildup with an actual and
complete song.
It is nearly as difficult to imagine the indie landscape
without British Sea Power as it is to come to grips with the fact that they
exist. As we dive deeper into a century
of microprocessing and wirelessness, they remain devotedly, energetically at
work in the Shop, torches ablaze. Somehow what they produce seems always to be well-realized and devoid of pretension
or luddism. It wraps us in the warm
blanket, and protects us with the firm shield, of what we have made, all of us,
since the dawn of industry and technology.
It is us now. We are
magnificent machineries of joy. Or maybe
it is just them.
Keepers: 1, 3, 5, 6,
7, 8, 9, 10
May 2013
