MAXIMO PARK - Quicken The Heart

The moment has come for a real and (perhaps) definitive reckoning for Maximo Park too. A quintessentially northern band, despite their Caribbean-sounding name (they hail from the chilly climes of Newcastle, all too close to Scotland's unforgiving winters), Maximo Park can rightfully boast a series of far from negligible achievements: for starters, that of being one of the very few "traditional" rock bands ever signed to a label devoted to the future and avant-garde electronic experimentation like Sheffield's Warp Records, to which must be added the far from secondary fact of having actually managed (within the space of three albums) to take that prestigious label straight to number one on the British sales charts. As they say, you try it, if you can.

Despite such credentials, the new album, "Quicken The Heart", produced by a heavyweight of the calibre of Nick Launay (in the past a trusted producer for Nick Cave and Talking Heads), hasn't enjoyed the best press, leaving more than one fan in a state of mild, dissatisfied perplexity. There's certainly some truth to it, in the sense that "Quicken The Heart" does indeed come across, from the very first listen, as less persuasive and poetically intense than its authoritative predecessors. But it would be an almost unforgivable mistake to get swept up in premature demolition urges and overly hasty vindictive instincts which, as we well know, tend to unleash their full destructive fury especially against those English bands who have had the fortune/misfortune of landing on the cover of NME for a week or two.

First of all, it isn't entirely fair to consider Maximo Park, as many tend to do, a trendy band, too similar to so many others. To stick with more recent news, for instance, "Quicken The Heart" is a record that opens with a line of crepuscular, secretly despairing beauty taken from Rainer Maria Rilke in 1909, and closes with a couplet in which everything is resolved and, at the same time, remains forever open and suspended, like "Time is over-rated/ Momentum carries me". The new songs are full of brilliant flashes of insight similar to the one just mentioned, and for the rest the band carries on playing what it has always played since the beginning: a nervy blend of melodic, cutting pop and punk, stuffed with romantic, heart-tugging choruses, enriched by lean rhythmic architectures with a new wave flavour and frothy, atmospheric keyboards. As if the Pixies or R.E.M. (just follow the gorgeous movement of "Questing, Not Coasting") of their first unforgettable three or four albums had crashed headlong into Magazine and Wire, before dissolving into a transparent, vaporous jingle worthy of the Smiths.

If the album as a whole then turns out to be a bit too cluttered and scattershot (with a finale whose tension visibly sags), it must nonetheless be admitted that some of the songs on it are more than good, at times even remarkable, elevated by the schizophrenic, imaginative poetic demon of singer (and highly skilled jumper) Paul Smith and by his voice, always perfectly taut and trembling with wonder.

It ranges from the sharp geometries of the single "The Kids Are Sick Again", interesting for its tortuous structure and for an arrangement particularly rich in detail and unexpected panoramic openings, before crashing into the hyperkinetic impetuousness of "Wraithlike", which seems to translate into music the disjointed, panting physical gestures that singer Paul Smith performs almost to the point of exhaustion on stage, all the way to the build of "Calm" (one of the happiest results) and the extremely subtle romantic introspection of the beautiful "Let's Get Clinical" (another song worth remembering). Also not bad, among others, are "A Cloud Of Mystery", "Tanned" and "Roller Disco Dancer".

In light of all this, "Quicken The Heart" comes across as a work that is at times a bit inconclusive and not always fully up to its own artistic ambitions. Nevertheless, as already mentioned, some moments on the album know how to engage beautifully with the listener's imagination and fragile emotional microcosm, conjuring up a silent novel of memories, wounds, broken loves, things that could have happened but didn't and, perhaps, never will. In this respect the band remains true to the poetic ideals that marked its debut, and can therefore carry on with its head held high, armed with a sensitivity and a penetrating, viscerally engaged outlook that very few bands today can truly claim to possess.

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12/06/2009