British Sea Power - The Lions of Power-Pop

On the surface, it's a fairly ordinary story, that of British Sea Power. Three English lads – Yan, Hamilton and Wood – schoolmates in Kendal, Cumbria, who dabble in various local bands until their exams are done. Yan then goes on to study at Reading University, where he meets guitarist Noble. A few years later, Hamilton and Wood join the pair and form the band they'd always dreamed of. The inevitable apprenticeship follows, made up of club gigs and demos: 4 tracks, to be precise, recorded in Reading under the moniker British Air Powers. A dead end. So the band decides to relocate to the livelier Brighton in search of glory. And with a new name: British Sea Power, taken from the title of one of the demo tracks, promptly renamed "Carrion". In Brighton there's life, and above all there's a venue the band makes entirely their own: a night-club called "Club Sea Power", where besides the "house band" other acts perform and even fashion shows are held.

So, it's time to dive into the record market, and the Cumbria band does so with a debut single, "Fear Of Drowning", released in an extremely limited edition on the small Golden Chariot label. But by now one of the big names of the indie scene has his eye on them, Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records, and in September 2001 British Sea Power sign a deal with the English label. By their side now is a new musician, Eamon (Eamon Hamilton), on keyboards, with whom they churn out their first wave of singles, built on sharp, quintessentially British power-pop.

The story itself is fairly ordinary, but the protagonists are decidedly bizarre. Among their influences they cite Eastern European literature, Czech literature in particular, they love new wave and Sonic Youth, and they enjoy toying with press and public alike by introducing themselves only by their surnames (Noble, Wood, Hamilton, with the exception of Yan, whose surname is actually Wilkinson). They love eccentric poses, then, but above all they scatter interesting, at times even brilliant, ideas across the eleven tracks of their debut album, The Decline Of British Sea Power (2003).

The real gems come right at the start: the first two tracks ("Men Together Today" is just a brief choral intro) are genuine strokes of genius, especially the single "Apologies To Insect Life", a mangled track fired off at supersonic speed, driven by a chaotic, frantic pace that recalls the Balkan folk of Goran Bregovic more than rock, before collapsing into a terrifying punk-ish racket. Even better is "Favour In The Beetrot Fields", a purely punk track this time (running time: 1'16") that even brings to mind the Pixies, with that acid-etched guitar and stormy drumming, the vocals struggling to keep pace with the musicians' sudden bursts of speed.

One does wonder, though, why with tracks like "Something Wicked" (very successful), "Blackout" and "The Lonely" (these two genuinely weak, by contrast), the band suddenly changes skin and gives itself over to delicate, melancholy ballads in the style of bands like the Smiths. "Remember Me" brings back the harder-edged harmonies, but in substance it's nothing more than power-pop that's only slightly more anxious than average: more interesting are "Fear Of Drowning", enriched by unexpected shifts into a more "distorted" register, and "Carrion", which hits on the most successful melody, complete with a background chorus, in the most classic English pop style.

Unexpectedly, there's the very long "Lately" (14 minutes), which starts off in Beatles-esque tones before gradually building in intensity until, in its second half, it spills over into a maelstrom of voices and distorted guitars, alternating sudden pauses and restarts and ending in a devastating crescendo that brushes up against noise. It's in this long, visionary jam that the band fully realizes what seems to be its founding idea: playing simple pop songs while having fun surprising the listener with sudden punk surges and bursts of genuine rhythmic madness.

"A Wooden Horse", however, immediately takes it all back and closes the album on dusky tones, once again clearly indebted to the Smiths. But then, isn't the whole of British pop-rock of the last fifteen years indebted to the Smiths? Being a debut, though, what matters most is the band's potential, which still appears blurry but nonetheless considerable.

The debut is a modest success: the single "Carrion" reaches the top of the UK's 40 most-played singles chart, and the album, despite not initially breaking through in the charts, will go on to sell 60,000 copies.

So, two years later, the follow-up is already in the bag: Open Season (2005).

If the debut album was packed with great ideas but assembled in a scattershot way by a band so eager to express itself that the whole thing ended up slightly out of focus, that problem seems to have been solved with the new record: effective songwriting now pairs with the consistency of eleven songs that are certainly softer and far more carefully arranged, while still happily flirting with the tradition of UK guitar pop. A tender naivety that recalls young David Bowie, combined with roots firmly planted in classic new wave, makes the sophomore effort a set of eleven iridescent gems: they may shine with reflected light, but they still carve out a shape of their own, sometimes nostalgic in tone, sometimes offering a reassuring smile. Just as reassuring as the notes of the single "It Ended On An Oily Stage", with its nimble gait built around one of those guitar riffs that stick with you and a half-whispered vocal that slightly apes Richard Butler, the unforgettable frontman of the Psychedelic Furs, whose second career phase - the one that gave us "Forever Now" and "Mirror Moves" - seems to be this band's guiding leitmotif.

With an opening like that, it's hardly surprising that the following track, "Be Gone", lands somewhere between "Love My Way" and "Heaven", the two Furs singles that, alongside "Pretty In Pink", got the biggest public response: vocals up front and the chorus dropped in right at the start of the song, with the brazen swagger nowadays found only in Interpol, whose aftertaste also surfaces on "Oh Larsen B". Listening to "How Will I Ever Find My Way Home?", it's almost impossible not to mentally chase after the punk-pop tricks of Pete Shelley and his Buzzcocks: try tracking down the track "I Believe" ("A Different Kind Of Tension", 1979).

If "Please Stand Up" aims to be a tribute to the kind of melancholy epic grandeur typical of bands like the Chameleons, "North Hanging Rock" is a melodic progression whose pathos has been missing from U2 at least since the days of "Joshua Tree". The same goes for "To Get To Sleep", though here the designated victim is Ian McCulloch of the Bunnymen, while judgment might be a touch harsher on "Victorian Ice", a track that's almost too blatantly more Smiths-like than the Smiths themselves. Timeless pop is paid tribute on the two tracks that close the album, "The Land Beyond" and "True Adventures", where guitars are set aside in favour of more orchestral movements, proving just how comfortable the band is with melody.

This time around, the commercial results are even more encouraging: the record reaches No. 13 on the UK albums chart. The band's popularity is also boosted by their curious live performances, which earn them the London Time Out Live Band of the Year award in 2004. British Sea Power often perform on a stage covered in plastic leaves and bird feathers, with active audience participation - fans are sometimes brought up on stage - while Eamon marches around playing a drum.

After a transitional mini-CD (Their Krankenhaus? Ep, 2007), which adds nothing particularly new to their repertoire, comes the third album, ironically titled Do You Like Rock Music? (2008), as if to underline their streak as would-be arena rockers.

There's still a distinct strain of disillusionment running through their emphatic, rousing rock. Something of the ramshackle post-punk of their debut remains, even if listening to "Do You Like Rock Music?" brings to mind more the full-bodied, neo-dandy pop of Arcade Fire or the emotional surge of Explosions in the Sky. And despite all this blaring momentum, the album only reveals itself gradually. You need to get used to the dazzling guitar blasts of "Lights Out for Darkier Skies" before you can spot the sunny melancholy of its very canadian-indie verse. "No Lucifer" follows the same line: it could pass for a rockier cover by My Latest Novel, another British band devoted to the Quebec sound. Not by chance, part of the record was actually recorded in Montreal, under the supervision of Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire) and Efrim Menuck (Godspeed You Black Emperor!).

With "Down On The Ground" and "A Trip Out" the band finally lays its cards on the table, revealing its ambition to emulate the latter-day U2: the sound is rougher, the first track's final turn is typically post-, but the guitar-and-vocal attitude is unmistakably that. Honourable mention for the radiant "Open The Door", suspended in a glockenspiel-dream that opens into a hit-and-run solo one step away from the Byrds' "My Back Pages".

These, in essence, are the coordinates of a record that can surprise you if you give it time, but which burns through its effective tricks fairly quickly, revealing a few weak spots (starting with the single "Waving Flags" - wasn't "Atom" more impactful?) that keep it from truly taking flight.

Having reached a satisfying standard of production (and success), the former post-punks from Brighton decide to temporarily set aside the tools of their now well-established trade (that is, an intellectual, epic, declamatory art-rock, loaded with novelistic pathos and well-cultivated lyricism) to embark on a new, disorienting and poetic project. They are entrusted with creating a new score for Robert J. Flaherty's silent documentary Man Of Aran, from 1934 (it won the "Mussolini Cup" at that year's Venice Film Festival, and is one of the torture films that, in "Secondo Tragico Fantozzi", office workers are forced to watch by their sadistic bosses!).

The film, a beautiful one, tells the story of a family of fishermen living on the Irish archipelago that gives the movie its title, and is a timeless ode to the anarchic power of that unforgiving nature to which man, despite all his dreams of control and technocratic omnipotence, must still, in spite of everything, pay his due.

British Sea Power (for the occasion expanded to a six-piece line-up, with the addition of viola and cornet) deliver a work that can broadly be placed within the essential stylistic traits of the most ethereal and cinematic post-rock, poised between Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, Dirty Three and above all Sigur Ros, with long instrumental pieces of powerful evocative force, marked by more or less layered progressions and long, pensive, descriptive ambient passages.

Without the essential accompaniment of the film's images, the compositions retain their own aesthetic consistency and a clear listenability, but the impact is slightly muted, leaving it to the listener's imagination to conjure up possible visual scenarios (try listening, for instance with your eyes closed, to the wonderful "Boy Vertiginous" or the frantic "Spearing The Sunfish", bordering on the most harrowing abstract expressionism).

The record nonetheless stands as one of the artistic peaks of the British outfit, an extraordinarily deep sonic fresco streaked with the poetic flash of primal, vital forces, a dizzying Ossianic poem lost in the inexhaustible description of natural beauty, poised between mystical ecstasy and raw terror. A significant step forward, one that will certainly leave its mark on the rest of the band's career, starting with the next track the group would release on their Myspace, "The Possibility Of An Island": 10 unbroken minutes of fleeting ambient touches that seem to foreshadow unexpected future directions.

Hamilton, Noble, Yan and Wood, in short, still manage to surprise, showing a restless creative streak that never tires of trying new solutions, even at the risk of being disorienting. A fair amount of anticipation, then, precedes the release of the new album Valhalla Dancehall (2011). All the more so after the quartet described the record as a cross between "Serge Gainsbourg and Kraftwerk of the Ralf & Florian era, with a dash of Stock, Aitken & Waterman". But there's none of that here. On the contrary, it rather seems that with this fifth full-length the band wanted to put together a kind of compendium of their entire career, a sort of best-of made up, however, of brand new songs. A paradox, sure, but it helps explain the sheer variety of sounds found on "Valhalla Dancehall". Scratchy pop-rock ("Who Is In Control", "We Are Sound", "Observe The Skyes"), evocative ballads ("Georgie Ray", "Luna"), post-punk neurosis (the pounding "Thin Black Sail", the darker "Mongk II") and ecstatic Sigur Ros-like passages ("Baby", "Cleaning Out The Rooms" and "Once More Now", the latter also winking at the Go-Betweens) alternate seamlessly, giving rise to a varied mix that nonetheless manages to find its balance thanks to songwriting that is by now well established, and arrangements shaped by a grandeur that occasionally recalls Arcade Fire.

The record also manages the feat of never sounding emptily self-congratulatory. Sure, it may lack the immediacy of The Decline Of The British Sea Power or the surprise factor of Man Of Aran: and yet there's still a genuine itch to experiment, a feverish pursuit of eccentricity, a refusal to flatten itself into bland britpop sounds, all of which make this album another solid brick in an increasingly important career.

The album holds more than one moment of real interest. "Georgie Ray" unveils a gorgeous piano melody, embellished by an energetic, emotional guitar solo that at times seems to nod to the languid theatricality of David Bowie and his disciple Jarvis Cocker; the same goes for the melancholic, choral "Luna". "Monkg II", for its part, grafts nervous, jagged guitars onto a metronomic beat, wrapping the whole thing in dark-wave moods (the reference point here seems to be almost Interpol), while "Observe The Skies" is an energetic slice of pop-rock with an irresistible chorus, marked by bouncing little keyboard lines. The minute and forty-six seconds of "Thin Black Sail" rides on frantic vocals, howling guitars and an incisive rhythm section, sitting exactly halfway (as a kind of crooked watershed) between the rapt crescendos of "Cleaning Out The Rooms" and "Once More Now", which, together with "Baby", make up the album's post-rock triptych.

The rest of the record glides along smoothly, without particular jolts but without any stylistic missteps either.

Valhalla Dancehall isn't the masterpiece that British Sea Power always seem capable of pulling off with every release, but it's still a more than solid record, one whose main strength lies in the balance between solidity, sturdiness and imagination, both in the songwriting and in the arrangements.

Having reached this centre of gravity in their body of work, the four musicians from Brighton arrive two years later at the new Machineries Of Joy, a title that borrows from a short-story collection by the American science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who had recently passed away. It's an album that captures a mature band, one that shows it can move confidently through its now well-established, yet broad, aesthetic canon.

On this occasion too, even more so than on the previous record, the intent is to draw on the full palette of colours that define their musical approach, leaning more towards the melodic nostalgia of Open Season than towards the more overtly rock moments, which do still surface, or towards other solid post-rock extemporisations from its predecessor.

At the end of the day, the truly vigorous moments that in some way pick up the drive of Valhalla Dancehall can be narrowed down to the punky "K Hole" and the uptempo "Monters Of Sunderland". The rest consists of a fleeting krautrock-tinged, Britpop-flavoured excursion on the dazzling title track that opens the album, the inspired half-tribute to Bowie and Lou Reed, complete with psychedelic drift, "Love Animals", "Spring Has Sprung" (which Arcade Fire would happily slot into their own songbook), and a series of pop songs ranging from more intimate moments to wave-leaning ballads.

The first strand includes the poignant lullaby "What You Need The Most" and the heartfelt, open-hearted tribute to the British sixties songwriter Geoff Goddard, "Radio Goddard", while the second can be traced back to the languid moods of the late Psychedelic Furs in "A Light Above Descending", to the melancholic, loose-limbed gait of "Hail Holy Queen", and to the dark-tinged but never despairing tones of "When A Warm Wind Blows Through The Grass", which closes one of the most convincing records by the Brighton ensemble.

A greater focus on song form has allowed Yann and co. to concentrate on what they do best, namely fine-tuning a clean structure in which melodic lines take centre stage. A risky path to tread if inspiration is lacking, but that's not the case here, since what's surprising, ten years on from their debut, is the solidity of a songwriting style that now pairs with a production maturity that deserves far more than the still-respectable number 19 peak with which Machineries Of Joy was greeted on the British charts.

In 2015 the Brighton band released one of its most distinctive projects: Sea Of Brass. The record follows a tour staged the previous year (the live tracks can be heard on the deluxe edition) and finds the English outfit reworking fourteen songs from their back catalogue in a completely new guise, namely with the accompaniment of a brass orchestra. Among the standout tracks are undoubtedly "Waving Flags" and "Machineries Of Joy".

Two years later, in 2017, British Sea Power released a new studio album titled Let The Dancers Inherit The Party. The record settles into the stylistic coordinates already well tested in previous releases, and is driven in particular by two singles with distinctly pop atmospheres: "Bad Bohemian", which serves as an ideal follow-up to the "Machineries Of Joy" single, and a "Keep On Trying (Sechs Freunde)" with blatantly radio-friendly appeal. Overall, the whole album benefits from a more direct and effective streak from the English outfit, who seem to have found the formula for a sound capable of reaching a wider audience than on several past releases.

In February 2022 came Everything Was Forever, once again released on their own label, Golden Chariot. Dropping the word "British" in favour of the simple name Sea Power is a pointed jab at Brexit, which saw England retreat back into its age-old isolation. The album continues and in some ways broadens the band's sonic path, moving in several directions that aren't always closely aligned. On one hand there's the post-punk revival, a vein that in some respects has become predictable by now, but all the more reliable for it. The pairing of "Transmitter" and "Two Fingers" (dedicated to the Wilkinson brothers' father, who recently passed away), spiced with new wave, hits hard and is of unquestionable quality. "Green Goddess", released as the lead single, also shows how well Sea Power know their craft when it comes to building big rock set-pieces, while "Doppelganger" falls a notch or two below in terms of results.

On the other hand, though, the English band seems to have lost a little of one of its defining traits along the way on this seventh studio album: that epic quality the group could once proudly wear as a badge of honour. This becomes even more apparent, perhaps, when listening to the other side of the coin, that batch of songs which favour a softer, seemingly more measured approach over sheer force. The hushed opening entrusted to "Scaring At The Sky" finds an echo in the slow-motion mini-symphony of "Fear Eats The Soul", but both seem to lack that extra spark one is fully entitled to expect from Sea Power, and which was certainly never missing in the past (the sweeping soundscape of "Man Of Aran", a genuine masterpiece, stands as proof of that). A spark the English band probably tries to strike on "Lakeland Echo" and "We Only Want To Make You Happy", whose orchestral openings recall territory that has always suited Besnard Lakes.

Halfway between the two approaches mentioned above sit the mid-tempo "Fire Escape In The Sea" and a "Folly" that takes on synthetic textures, picking up a conversation with certain strands of the Eighties that was never really closed. These are the more "pop" tracks on a record that isn't always perfectly focused, marked by both songwriting highs and less successful chapters, but which ultimately reaffirms the artistic depth of the Brighton outfit — perhaps less celebrated than other bands of their generation, but no less significant for it. If anything, quite the opposite.

The trajectory of the Brighton quartet, which to this day has never really suffered a genuine stumble, nonetheless bears witness to no small amount of talent which, combined with a fresh creative surge, could soon crown a new golden era. Who knows whether, sooner or later, the Power of the British Sea will finally make itself heard loud and clear even to those ears that, up to now, have yet to discover the band's undeniable talent.

VARIOUS ARTISTS = Mauro Roma (“The Decline Of British Sea Power”), Marco Sgrignoli (“Do You Like Rock Music?”), Francesco Giordani (“Man Of Aran”), Marco Loprete (“Valhalla Dancehall”), Fabio Guastalla (“Sea Of Brass”, “Let The Dancers Inherit The Party”, “Everything Was Forever”)

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