The Maccabees Colour It In - Raw Steel Album Review
Rating: C-
The Maccabees hail from Brighton, England but a musical ear hears an American neo-yelp band trying to sound British. A few years back I made a forgotten wager with a girl that The Arcade Fire sound was going to be the new mainstream. After hearing Interpol, Bloc Party, The Futureheads, Franz Ferdinand, etc get so much attention, it didn’t take long until a band like The Decemberists burst on the scene (thanks to Stephen Colbert). The Maccabees are in the discipline of the former mentioned bands, placing them in limbo between trend-setting and mainstream acts.Lyrical themes on their new album, Colour It In, suggest; teen angst, ‘new love insecurities’ and a feeling that even going to the supermarket is a struggle, as the song Lego suggests- “So look left and look right, cross the road and hold my hand”.
A band written off as ‘the same of the same’ is a hasty critique. The Maccabees won’t be your favorite band, but they will force you to either rethink some of your favorite bands of the genre or to simple turn them off and put your favorites in.
Orlando Weeks, ironically, can’t seem to get away from conformist lyrics as in the song Latchmere -- “Madames and Monsieurs please return to your cubicles”. He sure loves the ever-present anti-ignorant topic, ANTI-CHRISTIANity, which, must be said, is a beaten horse due to the Internets vast dissemination of atheist/agnostic values. In all, more of a conforming act is to dis on the almighty. Weeks makes one want to believe in God again to keep their statuscool, as he suggests in his own singing-- “Symetricool, hypocriticool, analyticool, so criticool”.
It’s not all bad for bands that come out with identical content to their predecessors. There’s always that person that stumbles upon a band like The Maccabees and gets introduced to a new sound --possible candidates: a tweener, a 52 year old man in a mid-life crisis, and that Geico caveman. The album does indeed sound solid (a positive) despite the review completed before it began.
-Raw Steel
3 comments:
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