MACCABEES - Wall Of Arms

This young and highly promising Brighton band has had the great fortune of never achieving an overly deafening success with the public and press, especially at home, where things tend to move far too quickly. This entirely accidental circumstance ended up protecting the group, leaving it ample room to experiment and the chance to cultivate its own stylistic research without the obsession of chasing big numbers at all costs. The more-than-convincing 2007 debut “Colour It In” secured the band a solid following (including the strategically crucial Radio 1 DJ Steve Lamacq) and a small cult aura within the indie circuit, making the follow-up “Wall Of Arms” one of the most anticipated releases of this part of the season among the “scene” audience.

The Maccabees thus prove to have grown enormously. The new album has a far richer, denser, more worked-on and sophisticated sound than its predecessor, enriched by more complex and structurally ambitious instrumental touches, nicely introduced to the listener's ear by the single given away as a free download, “No Kind Words”, an excellent song marked by darting guitar progressions and dizzying sonic spirals, which presents a substantially new image of the band, more introspective and mature, poised between Cure (who had also been decisive in shaping the debut), early Talking Heads, Xtc, Sound and Joy Division.

The band's frame of reference remains decidedly post-punk, but the new songs show how the group has learned to make the most of vocal interplay (also being able to count on a genuinely incisive singer like Orlando Weeks, among the best of his generation alongside the more pyrotechnic and fanciful Hayden Thorpe of Wild Beasts), grafting onto their poetics a decidedly epic and more narrative vein, at times almost baroque, which stands out all the more when compared to the sharp, bare-bones songs, like shards of red-hot metal, on the debut.

It's really hard, then, not to think of Arcade Fire, especially since Markus Dravs, who had already worked with the Canadian band on “Neon Bible“, was involved in producing the album. But this isn't such an insurmountable limitation (however evident it may be, it has to be said), because songs like the opener “Love You Better” show fairly clearly how this young group is able to intelligently and knowingly manipulate its sources, adding a myriad of details and small but meaningful nuances, like brief passages of dense psychedelic suspension, horns, choral counterpoints, gorgeous guitar geometries, a sense of pathos and emotional intensity, above all intensity. And while “One Hand Holding” is already a potential perfect single destined to get stuck in the folds of memory, the remarkable “Can You Give It” climbs up a crackling march that then explodes into a chorus of great power, almost like Dexys Midnight Runners at their best.

Also very good are the romantic “Kiss And Resolve”, “Seventeen Hands” and the closing “Bag Of Bones”.

The overall impression is that the band has succeeded where the likes of Futureheads, Bloc Party or Rakes have partly failed, delivering an album able to appreciably combine wave-based songwriting with a mood that's very visceral, nervy and happily inventive, capable of unfolding into compositions rich in melodic ideas and pleasantly evocative imagery. It's the right path, and the band will no doubt reap all the acclaim it deserves in the near future.

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29/05/2009