Opera House - The Man Next Door (G/L/A/Z/E)
3/5
By: Christiana Spens
They say they sound like "opera in a tin can", but they don't (that's Charlotte Church, actually). No, Opera House are far more like the gaudy cabaret and music hall sounds of the thirties, with something of a Freddy Mercurian influence, something even a little like No Doubt back in the ska-ridden nineties. They also declare such influences as Arcade Fire (everyone's saying that now), Talking Heads and Velvet Underground... They have that circus festival sound, with echoes of the music they play on merry-go-rounds... (I rhymed three times!)
And I don't know why, but their latest single also reminds me of the musical 'Oliver!', when all the little urchins are tap-dancing. And I'm sure they're using the same keyboard as the Klaxons, which I'm convinced is the same model we had in music classes at school and which led to a confusion when the genre buttons didn't work and "Rock", "Jazz", "Pop" and "Classical" all sounded exactly the same. Maybe that is why Opera House think they sound like opera, when really they could be any of the genre buttons. I think the Klaxons may also have experienced this confusion concerning the "Rave" button.
The Man Next Door' is also quite like Yeti's 'Midnight Flight', though not nearly as dark and gloaming a piece, not so deep a voice, and as far as I can tell, it's not about a serial killer. Nevertheless, the song conjures pictures of heavy eyelids, heavy eye-liner and a heavy pout. Listening to it is like a stranger in a Camden pub telling you a dark little story with delirious, yearning Irish eyes a-smiling, though you don't quite follow the story, but you hear the music in his voice and the expression of lips, but even when I've listened to the single a long number of times, I still don't really know anything about the Man Next Door. Except that I think he lives in Camden. And he probably doesn't like tap-dancing urchins very much.
Artists in this article: Opera House
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