Mew - Visuals
Drowned In Sound 70
If, like me, you have had many a 'moment' with Frengers, the third album from Mew and particularly its closing track 'Comforting Sounds', which features the best symphony in distortion and controlled chaos I've ever heard, the progression the band has made over their next three records may have been something of a challenge. Perhaps you've been ever-more exhilarated as the boundaries of what seemed possible for the band back in 2003 have been stretched ever further. Perhaps you've found the Danish quartet (now trio after the departure of Bo Madsen in 2015) increasingly frustrating and, dare it be said, irrelevant, as their scope has expanded and sent their power and purpose in the other direction.
Visuals is Mew's most accessible and direct album in recent memory, possibly ever. The band seem invigorated, purposeful, ebullient event. As 'Nothingness and No Regrets' heralds the opening of the album – called Visuals because the visuals for the touring shows the band are currently undertaking were envisioned prior to the writing of a single note – and cascades into a driving electro pop swirl of toms, synths and understated guitars as Jonas Bjerre's vocals drift, in their customary multi-tracked way atop it all, the first thing that comes to mind is that this could be Mew's bid for a more youthful audience. Everything is mixed bright. Synth leads are prominent and hooky, the drums are prominent, bass is made to sound synthesised. The feeling persists on 'The Wake of Your Life', a more 'Mew'-like track which moves through several sections, most of them unexpected, but is lifted by a glorious punch of a chorus, just like its predecessor.
There's an aggression at the heart of 'Candy Pieces All Smeared Out' and 'Ay Ay Ay', largely provided by thunderous bass riffs, which has been sorely lacking on recent Mew releases. The latter utilises the underused 6/4 time signature. The effect can be disorienting. Feet aren't used to tapping in six crotchets. They'll catch up eventually though and you'll find that this is a real album highlight.
Frustratingly, 'Learn Our Crystals' and 'Twist Quest' feel insubstantial by comparison with what goes before. 'Twist Quest' featuring an inexcusable saxophone solo and tips things a touch too far in the direction of the Eighties. Perhaps confusingly, my other frustration with this song is that, just as it is setting up what could be a really intense middle eight or coda, it fades out and finishes, designed, apparently, to operate as a pop song. 'Shoulders' restores order, an intelligent ballad full of yearning.
Happily, closing trio '85 Videos', 'Zanzibar' and 'Carry Me To Safety' restore any faith that may have been lost about Mew being a substantial and important band. '85 Videos' is a driving pop song of the kind that only Mew can really write and pull off effectively. It sounds like all the best songs you listen to, but at the same time could only be a Mew song. Perhaps you know what I mean by this. Sorry if you don't. 'Zanzibar' is a beautiful, downtempo ballad and then, as with most Mew albums comes the closer. And what a closer it is. Feeling like the 'Comforting Sounds' this iteration of Mew could write, the first half of the track is a mid-tempo groove of relatively standard proportions for this band, before it booms into a coda of gorgeous noise. The album's second sax solo plays a major role, this time to much better effect and everything finishes on a wonderful note.I'd write more but I don't want to spoil it for you.
And so, the first album for some time as a trio from Mew epitomises all that is both great and frustrating about the band. Far from perfect, but confident and assured. Sure, it's easy to miss the days of dominant guitars and a 'rock' feeling underpinning the whole thing, but this feels like the right album for Mew to re-emerge with at this point.
Sat May 27 02:53:00 GMT 2017Pitchfork 62
In Sam Gosling’s book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, the psychology professor sheds light on the complex workings of identity—for example, the person who identifies as a cultured world traveler when in fact he never ventures beyond the homogenous comfort of the resort. Mew sound like a band for pop natives who fancy themselves intrepid explorers of indie, prog, and art-rock, but who don’t learn the language. The members of Mew resist an identification with progressive rock themselves, but the grandiosity of their music has led others to tag them as such.
Ever since their 1997 debut A Triumph for Man, Mew also mimicked the wide-open ambience and clean-toned guitar jangle pioneered by ’90s indie icons like Slint. By 2005’s And the Glass Handed Kites, they were showing exceptional agility at pivoting between styles, albeit with a dabbler’s mentality and a thick coat of commercial gloss. If the members of Mew feel any heat when making their music, it hardly ever comes across from under its pristine surface. And so it’s tempting to view the band as Denmark’s answer to Coldplay, though with more chops—but on their seventh album, Visuals, Mew show that’s not the case, if only in flashes.
If you’re looking for pop with a light outer frosting of edginess, Visuals hits the spot and then some. But if you’d like to hear Mew explore those edges and break free from the stultifying safety of their music, Visuals leaves you frustrated. About a quarter of the way through the album, for example, the bombastic synths of “In a Better Place” give way, ever so gracefully, to soft trickles of jazz trumpet in the song’s final minute. Smooth elevator jazz or muzak-grade new age would have fit the mood; instead, Mew create a tastefully solemn atmosphere that would fit right in on a Jon Hassell record.
Likewise, “Candy Pieces All Smeared Out” closes with an almost imperceptibly quiet loop that sounds like a record needle reaching the end of the groove and skipping over and over. It suggests that Mew could say a lot more with less, and that they even might shock the world if they took a serious stab at their own version of ambient music. In reverse, sometimes they try too hard to rough things up. “Candy Pieces” starts with a dissonant hard rock riff that comes off as forced, almost as if the band had imagined itself scoring a Transformers action sequence. Once they arrive at the swooning keyboards that underscore the verse, it makes you wonder why they didn’t just allow the song to remain beautiful in its plain, unassuming way.
Visuals achieves the majesty of classic progressive rock once, in its closing number, “Carry Me to Safety.” An epic done in trademark Mew fashion—grand but also rigidly economical and concise—“Carry Me” bears the most obvious markings of prog. In fact, the song pretty much follows the blueprint for how to segue from pastoral acoustic guitar arpeggios à la Yes and Jethro Tull to tidal swells of keyboard that invoke a feeling of liftoff into to the clouds. “Give them hell!/Give them hell until the bell,” sings frontman Jonas Bjerre. Unsurprisingly, Bjerre barely sounds ruffled, much less agitated. If only Bjerre and company would give us hell from time to time.
Wed Apr 26 05:00:00 GMT 2017