British Sea Power - 'Open Season' (Rough Trade Records)
4/5
By: Toby L
Just goes to show. Hiring in a definitively pop producer, touring with kindred weirdo spirits Interpol and Flaming Lips, having a stonkingly decent debut-album go silver (2003's masterful 'The Decline Of...'), existing as label-mates with The Strokes and The Libertines, being publicly revered as a bit weird, and writing impeccable Pulp-through-way-of-Ian Curtis odes... goes a long, long way.
British Sea Power are an enchantment. Their aforementioned debut was an all-too-scarce emblazoning of almost-traditional, sentimental songwriting and eccentric conjecture in equal, unsettling measure - one instance, we're engrossed in the ten-minute balladic epic, 'Lately', the next ricocheting our brain to and fro as we absorb a rampant 'Apologies To Insect Life'. 'Open Season' is the realisation of their pop inclination. Eleven tracks where every song is awash with distant, elegiac charm and winsome innocence, every chorus a rush of skyward-glaring majesty. With their current, British Sea Power are proving themselves to be any artist's most endeavoured but consistently failed of pursuits - important.
Opening is recent top-twenty piercer 'It Ended On An Oily Stage' - a song the band themselves freely confess to being not about anything in specific - but, my, what a belter; the thick sludgey guitars tussle and pull and the choral proclamation to have 'found God... in a Yorkshire field' is little other than inspired. 'Be Gone', meanwhile, weaves in a nagging hook which sounds just like Gillette's 'the best a man can get!' advert lingo, and 'Will I Ever Find My Way Home?' is a Belle & Seb splicing of schmindie, until a killer, crushing belt of six-strings cuts through and crashes the (tea-)party.
Soon, it's BSP's crowning moment, however. 'Please Stand Up' is anthemic. Even after all so far, we're astonished. A chorus that can be bellowed along to. A vocal from eager-eyed singer-boy Yan that is heartfelt and instantly melodic. And the sense that this is a band escaping the peripheries of elite outer-indie status and embarking defiantly upon the realms of the grander barn-fillers.
The thunderous romp of 'To Get To Sleep' continues the sense of ascent, as does the shuffling, strumming chug of 'Victorian Ice' and subtly booming rapture of 'Oh Larsen B', with its stadia-minded ambition and intensely drawn-out close. The strings-bolstered 'The Land Beyond' provides some romantic, hopeful respite, more low-key than its counterparts, and all the more quietly triumphant for it, whilst the final 'True Adventures' seems to be self-explanatory - a song of foxes and valleys and mountains, and only opening after a minute of storm-like instrumental disarray. It's a suitably dramatic conclusion.
Eco-friendly, nationally charged and more phenomenal than ever before, British Sea Power: welcome, your turn starts here.
Artists in this article: British Sea Power
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