The Boy Least Likely To - The Law of the Playground (Too Young To Die)
3/5
By: Mark Holland
Listening to The Law of the Playground is (I would imagine) like going to a six year old's birthday, having quite a nice time, yet remaining constantly aware that you could inadvertently kill one of the children on the bouncy castle. Your mouth instantly releases that chemical which tells you not to eat any more cake, and "stranger danger" suddenly retains its place of importance at the front of your mind. You begin to wonder whether you could still ride a bicycle without stabilisers, and what Rosie and Jim were really up to on that barge.
The songs involve glockenspiels played without sarcasm, banjos without connotations of toothlessness and recorders which probably don't even smell bad. Most of them have names which quite intentionally refer to some aspect of childhood which has received too much coverage on CBBC; there's one about conkers, one about balloons, one about lemonade, and one about butterflies...
However, since The Boy Least Likely To are all grown up now, they attempt to instil a certain sense of the melancholy and the bittersweet by, for example, attaching the balloon to a "broken string". The song immediately becomes tragic or poignant or something. We wish that the string was fixed, or whatever that represents. Then we speculate whether it would be better to just be floating about. We wonder whether there was helium in the balloon.
The next song comes on, and this one's about putting butterflies in boxes; it's tragic, it's poignant, we speculate. It's not that The Law of the Playground is formulaic - rather its own ideas, while not necessarily over-explored elsewhere in pop music, are perhaps over-explored within the album itself. Some of us like to remember our childhoods the way that we're supposed to - like a sort of cross between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and an advert for Werther's Originals.
The music, however, is certainly melodic enough to warrant the tag of "indie pop", and upbeat enough to be described as "twee". Catchy little verses are followed by catchy little violin hooks and twinkly little glockenspiel parts, all set to a simple, solid, inoffensive beat accentuated by hand-claps. While the mixture certainly exacerbates headaches, its prettiness can also convey something pleasant in the right circumstances. 'The Nature of The Boy Least Likely To', a dreamy Blur (after they decided not to play cockney-geezer songs but before they fell out with Graham) style slow-mover is very nicely put together, while 'Stringing Up Conkers' harnesses the awesome power of the giro in a manner unparalleled since 'The Man Who Sold The World'.
When all cynicism is repressed and The Law of the Playground is considered as what it is, fundamentally a pop record aimed squarely at the charts, it is difficult to criticise. For those who are more comfortably accommodated by something a little uglier or more complex, however, the squeaky-clean production can prove quite grating.
Artists in this article: The Boy Least Likely To
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