BNQT - Volume 1

The Guardian 100

(Bella Union)

Like every successful collaboration, BNQT’s Volume 1 – a title that echoes supergroup forebears the Traveling Wilburys – is much more than the sum of its parts.

BNQT (we’re supposed to say “Banquet”) is the result of what happened when Eric Pulido of Midlake brought together Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses, Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, Fran Healy of Travis and Jason Lytle of Grandaddy.

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It’s been 17 years since Travis took home NME’s Artist of the Year award, right smack between two album releases that sold millions in the UK alone. Some 15 years have passed since the characters took a shopping break during their fight against zombies in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later to the tune of Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180.” Nearly 13 years ago, Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll for singles, becoming an alternative radio staple in the process. And barely more than a decade has passed since Band of Horses made “The Funeral” their first single, eventually reaching ubiquity through features in movies, television, and a particularly inescapable commercial for the Ford Edge.

For Midlake, the fifth band associated with new supergroup BNQT, there isn’t a similar time peg to note a crest of success. Since forming in 1999, their career arc has been slower and steadier than all the aforementioned artists, with bandleader Eric Pulido describing a workmanlike cycle of “write, record, tour, repeat” that can be seen as both a privilege and a vocational rut. So, while touring Midlake’s last album Antiphon, Pulido conceived of BNQT. He would share songwriting duties on the new project with the leaders of bands he had met over the years, each crafting two songs apiece from their respective camps and piecing the elements together both remotely and inside a studio in Denton, Tex.

BNQT (pronounced “banquet”) is not a push outside the comfort zone for those involved, but further indication of restlessness from a collection of indie rock lifers, each of whose primary acts made their dent in the blog-rock boom and find their relevance dimming. At that, the optimistically titled Volume 1 serves more to elaborate on its characters than it does to recapture past glory. Midlake’s McKenzie Smith, Joey McClellan, and Jesse Chandler are the chameleonic house band, taking cues from the songs’ originators and finding cohesion in fully-realized arrangements. But it’s the songs themselves that are thin. Pulido is the only artist bringing A-level material with his vaguely-psychedelic “Restart” and his best nod to buoyant ’70s AM radio “Real Love.” They are a pair of songs geared specifically as singles, despite the lack of platforms for such singles to thrive. Travis’ Fran Healy steps out as a caricature of collective recording, with “L.A. on My Mind” begging for a sync with its titular geotag, hand-clap rhythm, and flexing guitar bravado. Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell doesn’t fare much better, as “Unlikely Force” is content with personality-free breeziness and “Tara” buries Bridwell’s best asset, his voice, with muddy harmonies and an uninspired vocal performance.

It’s only Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos that find success under the BNQT banner. Lytle’s usual recordings are so deeply insular that there is something to be gleaned from hearing him apart from his busted-keyboard sonics. His whisper-singing stands up to the orchestration of “Failing at Feeling” and “100 Million Miles” is one of the only songs of the collection that dares to drift beyond classic rock nostalgia. Kapranos, on the other hand, gleefully swims in the opportunity to get weird. Just the word “banana” rolling off his tongue on “Hey Banana” argues for adding smoked-ham lounge singing to his resume.

“I think we could all use a restart,” Pulido claims on the album opener, a song that readily admits that he’s “older now” and “broken but soon on the mend.” It’s a sentiment that could umbrella all five songwriters that have never struggled with maturity but are now toiling with getting old. Where lesser people might simply buy sports cars, musicians do these hapless projects that are more fun for the artists involved than for the listeners, like their own boring social scene. So when Pulido describes BNQT as “a poor man’s version of the Traveling Wilburys” in a press release, there’s some solace in everyone knowing where exactly where they stand. It gives the project the inability to disappoint. Aim low enough and you’ll never fail.