The Big Pink – A Brief History Of Love (4AD)
4/5
By: Alex Hibbert
The Wall Of Sound. Unkempt in nature at first, founded on a sensibility of lascivious abundance and the foundation from which grew music’s behemoth-like skyscraper’s; a walled city of reverb and industrial chatter that’s echoed through the last few decades in the recesses of emptily decorated floors. And now? Detached from history’s connotation and warped in the Twenty-First Century realisation that we’re all beings fated to expire; twisted into something horrific, yet beguiling.
It’s this sensibility from which The Big Pink’s debut is mined, and the catalyst for such a bewitching brew? What else but love. “Love for all” they proclaim, but really that outburst feels churlish, as A Brief History of Love doesn’t feel particularly loving. Instead inside beats the heart of a malcontent, mixed with the sounds of a melancholic majority bursting out of dimly lit rooms and turning faces away from passenger windows – though The Big Pink are in essence a duo, their sound is nothing but huge – defining an experience that consistently amazes in its assured-ness.
Forging the ideas of their forebears into new images, Furze and Cordell shy away from the influences they so easily could have squatted – Cocteau Twins, Digital Hardcore, even early Britpop’s anthemic bluster - and choose to dwell in narrow streets, holding collars closely to their necks as they walk. ‘Crystal Visions’ stalks in the background, a looped electronic wheeze built slowly into a heavily hung layer of smog billowing above from Furze’s guitar. If The XX’s recent debut was a whispered endearment after the lights off, on A Brief History... the mix of guitar blistering outwards from its own reflection and the endless pulse of Milo’s laptop shows an overstated statement can work just as well.
‘Dominos’ is almost superfluous, its verses hard to concentrate on, its chorus nothing but gloriously signalling the fact that The Big Pink could make an album of sung-along epics, but prefer a more cerebral remedy to music’s stagnating populous. ‘Velvet’s unsettling allurement is nothing short of extraordinary, but on ‘Too Young To Love’ they repeat the trick with a scream of rusted metal in place of disembodied coo, the title a crushed announcement amongst the wreckage. ‘Love in Vain’ and the title track itself are the ‘ballads,’ the former the most sparsely formed arrangement, swelling in the echo picked guitar, whereas the latter’s rippling beauty is formed in Valentine and Furze’s conversation as a mushroom clouds slowly together in the distance. Towards the album’s close its structure slowly becomes more uniform, and when it comes, the end feels necessary. The album’s apocalyptic mood overpowered the senses just enough, and has to renew itself again. ‘Count Backwards From Ten’ signals that very thing, “Better off dead” the band sing, then finally expel.
Praise indeed, but the futurism that’s stemmed amid the disappointments of our generation’s downfall has infected music in haphazard ways. We’ve had the luxurious femme fatale take over, pathos lit brightly on dance floors and disguised beneath the glamour of other’s work; we’ve had the sparse, defeated thoughts, wrapped neatly and packaged in cleanly cut lines and intensely concentrating on its modernity. It was only a matter of time before an album came along that managed to achieve what they couldn’t so easily: an album that defines atmosphere; conveys a message from a barely formed or dwelt upon thought, instead conjugating from a philosophy in which the heart shatters and we live on anyway, or we shatter hearts and live on the same.
Artists in this article: The Big Pink
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