Maccabees - Those Fine London Lads

It happens that, after crossing Europe for forty dates, you feel like going home. The thing is, though, that if your name is now The Maccabees, then home becomes the recording studio, and you're happy to go back there, to write, because your age and your trade allow you to free yourself from the constraints that even just repeating a setlist imposes on you.

So it happens that this South London band, based in Brighton, made up of middle-class lads and university students, ends up calling that very recording studio home, and from within it, over a year and a half of work – part of 2010 and all of 2011 – draws out Given To The Wild, the third chapter of their career.

And it's a work masterfully crafted, in concept and in detail, by the band first and foremost, and secondly by the array of producers/engineers hired for the job: Tim Goldsworthy (Massive Attack, Lcd Soundsystem, Cut Copy) and Bruno Ellingham (Moby, Goldfrapp) handle the electronic-leaning production; Jag Jago and Sean Julliard (Vaccines, Friendly Fires) alternate it with an indie-rock slant, and Cenzo Townshend (Florence and the Machine, Snow Patrol, Bloc Party, Editors) mixes the whole energetic complex together.

The result is an album that skilfully blends keyboards with guitars, with standout performances from Jarvis on bass and Doyle on drums. You can sense how the record functions as a kind of continuum with Wall Of Arms, where that reflective mood was already perceptible — and which, on Given To The Wild, is amplified by beds of keyboards and horns with a less carefree attitude.

Given to The Wild was released on 9 January 2012 through Fiction Records, debuting at number 4 on the UK charts and marking the arrival of a new touring member in the band, Will White on keyboards, brother of Hugo and Felix.

The new look the band gives its Maccabees haircut is partly revealed during the launch show at Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth in August 2011, where the darker, more intimate colours that the five-piece explore on Given To The Wild can already be felt. The single "Pelican", released in November 2011, insistently knocks on the door of the English media and of NME, which relents by giving the band the magazine's cover a month later. Track 8 on the album is a tribute to nature, but not to the natural order of things, to the beginning and end of things, to the eternal battle between contradictions: Orlando's voice, by now well-defined, defined but not definitive, melodiously counterpoints the White brothers' jagged guitars, only to embrace them in the end, when the rhythm turns quick, even more frantic and wild.

Given To The Wild is brilliant in its own way: witness the shimmer of "Glimmer", a sheet of water in which you can admire Weeks' silky voice and the White brothers' two-finger arpeggios, rippled at the close by sharp shards of synth; and on the second single, "Fell To Follow", the cascading guitars prove that atypical glow, an eternal chase, made ever more intimate by Weeks' lyrics and dusted by Will White's keyboard beds.

On "Go" the band shows a "striving towards", the dynamism of growth still in progress, which bodes well for future releases and also rules out any notion of a fully achieved maturity; Doyle alternates downtempo electronic rhythms in search of balance, found when you let yourself fall, trustingly, into the sincere waves of Felix White's riff, just beyond the words sung by Orlando: “It was not enough/ It’s not enough/ And it never was”.

Although a thoroughly Maccabees album, Given To The Wild is also a nod of recognition to vintage British pop-rock: Queen, Coldplay, Radiohead. The choral endings present in almost every track bring to mind the virtual embraces between audience and band at their shows, as Chris Martin well teaches us, and certain synth keyboards — in "Heave", for instance — can't help but evoke the "Queen of England"; and "Slowly One", sadly, conveys that Weeks' romantic spirit has grown darker, moving to the refined chimes of Doyle's drums, flowing over the liquid currents of Felix White's guitar in Johnny Greenwood mode: “Every new encounter that’s not her/ leaves you cold/ Some day you’re going to wake up/ and think you went a day without”, just before a fierce headache erupts, delivered by Hugo White's virulent guitar, with the horn section and brother Will joining in.

Not only does the mood darken, it becomes downright cryptic on "Unknown", where a marvellous Catherine Pockson of the duo Alpines closes out the album's most unsettled track, reminding Orlando that "Just while love remembers", in a place where an imposing gothic church has been built, with new wave guitar foundations and Editors pillars, embellished by rhythmic spires of African percussion.

The band carries on its shoulders a tour that spans the globe, starting in January 2012 and taking in the UK, Europe, Australia, Japan, the United States, Canada and Mexico, touring alongside Florence and the Machine and that golden goose known as the Black Keys; once again they take on the major international festivals, adding Spain's Benicassim, the Netherlands' Lowlands and Ireland's Picnic to their list; they go gold in the UK in 2012, and Given To The Wild is nominated Album of the Year at the 2012 Mercury Prize, going on to win at the 2013 NME Awards.

A new hypothesis of genre

The choice this time was to record and produce an album finally on their own, armed only with their own ideas. The opportunity arose when the "South Londoners" all five found themselves in Elephant & Castle, straddling zones 1 and 2 of London, and there they decided to live and to build their own recording studio, in a neighbourhood that has lately been enjoying £1.5 billion in funding — no small change for a building and social regeneration project.

Just as neighbourhoods evolve under the natural push of the people who inhabit them, so too The Maccabees reach the fourth phase of their career, which, three years on from Given To The Wild, sees them take centre stage with Marks To Prove It, long awaited by a host of fans both at home and abroad.

Marks To Prove It opens with "Marks To Prove It", a direct, forthright single that looks backward — all the way to the early days of Colour It In — and where the most interesting point isn't really the texture of the track itself, but rather the sheer command of their craft that the English band now possesses, a kind of musical autopoiesis, a genre embodied and distinguishable from all others.

Shedding a few rough patches along the way ("Something Like Happiness", "WWI Portraits"), evidence of the difficulties mentioned above, you can nonetheless come across some top-class tracks: "Kamakura" is one of them, with its dreamy guitar strokes delicately underscored by Weeks' now unmistakable voice, and "Spit It Out" — honestly the album's best-realised and most complete track — a trait d'union between the three previous records and the most intriguing path forward, a continuous crescendo somewhere between Elton John, Queen and big English stadium choruses.

The unprecedented piano doesn't stop at "Spit It Out", but runs as a thread through the whole new record, much as horns once did on Wall Of Arms; we hear it on "Silence", a ballad sung by Hugo, on the rubbery "Slow Sun" and on the dewy "Pioneering Systems", which together with "Ribbon Road", but especially with "Dawn Chorus", lets us hear just how deeply The Maccabees have absorbed the art of Richard Hawley: the former Pulp man is the light that illuminates the most moving and profound piece on Marks To Prove It, a delicate, tinkling pop ballad of old-fashioned taste and refinement, accompanied by a spine-tingling horn section.

Marks To Prove It is a record that grows on you after repeated listens, constantly improving, one in which you uncover small details that create irresistible atmospheres, marking the difference between run-of-the-mill quantity and the refined quality of a new identity-driven phenomenon we might simply call fair-rock. The Maccabees thus seem to be searching for a new, and for now definitive, identity in which to fully express themselves; the strong impression is that outside pressures do nothing for the artistic peace of mind of these good lads, who instead find themselves constantly having to prove they're something more than honest, reliable human beings.

Young Colossus: Orlando Weeks' side-project

"Two years ago now I started putting down songs

that in a way had nothing to do with Maccabees

in fact, they had nothing to do with anything"

(Orlando Weeks)

In May 2012 Orlando Weeks officially announced Young Colossus, a side-project featuring Nic Nell on production and Alessi Laurent-Marke, known as Alessi's Ark, a young singer-songwriter from Hammersmith, London. The project was launched with an eponymous EP made up of 6 tracks and a 24-page storybook illustrated by Robert Hunter.

Young Colossus is in effect a demonstration of what Weeks means by the term Art, that is, a conception embracing multidisciplinarity, one that doesn't settle for clear-cut stances or snap judgments about what best represents it or what fails to.

The record has Mediterranean, almost Hellenic sounds of classical guitar ("Franky") interspersed with drums and electronic pads, seasoned by the blend of Weeks' voice with that of Alessi's Ark, which owes a debt to the Kate Bush of "Lionheart", the Bjork of "Volta" and, more recently, the deep Bat For Lashes'/Natasha Khan's work. "Sleeper" moves through Eastern musical territory, and while Alessi's timbre does nothing to dispel the comparison with Miss Khan, Weeks' artistic abilities are a pleasant surprise, on a record where he's engaged more as composer/musician than as singer. "Xhocka" shows off Orlando's ethnic ambitions: in a spirit of research and experimentation he leafs through the musical atlas of India and South Africa, extracting a refined, stubborn composition that lights up the eyes with a fantastical forest, not unlike those admired on James Cameron's planet Pandora.

Released in a limited edition of 1500 copies (EP+Storybook) by Chrysalis Music Ltd., Young Colossus could prove to be an avant-garde artistic laboratory for the future artistic directions of Maccabees.

Orlando Weeks' solo adventure after the band's breakup

Orlando Weeks' life has changed a lot in recent years — to put it simply: he became a father; before working on this "A Quickening" he even wrote a children's book. This change, the new everyday life of the former Maccabees frontman, is crystal clear in his new way of writing songs.

There's so much calm, such delicate shifts and deep reflections to be found across these eleven tracks that, rather than Maccabees, what comes to mind is the fragile Antlers of "Familiar", or the submerged lyrics of Robert Wyatt. A wide variety of arrangements — admittedly rather static ones — isn't really among the record's traits, which stays constantly anchored to very slow structures made of elegant piano notes, light electronic touches (the glitchy ending of "Safe In Sound", the heartbeat of "Takes A Village"), light dashes of horns that peek through in the livelier tracks ("St. Thomas", "All The Things") and in the mistier ones ("None Too Tough", "Milk Breath"), precise drumming, at times martial, but nonetheless brushed, soft.

"A Quickening" is a very uniform record, made up of discreet sounds that are never banal, meant to bring out the whispered, moved thoughts of the singer-songwriter and young father. Uniform, too, are the quality and refinement, which point decidedly upward.

In a brief rundown of must listens, mention must certainly go to the delicate opener "Milk Breath", all tenderness toward his son, immersed in a fragile bubble of affection and milk breath, the magnificent landscapes of "Takes A Village", the vibrant, jazzy "All The Things", and the dreamlike flourishes of the opera singer that close out "Dream" and the record with it. These are all tracks that an inattentive ear might take to be too similar to one another, but which instead live and shine thanks to details and nuances that reward the more attentive listeners, those willing to take in these confessions by dim light.

Contribution by Michele Corrado ("A Quickening")

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