Mew

Every now and then they admit it. These damned bands, children of the Nineties, raised on the myth of indie/alternative rock destroying every falsity and frill, on the fetish of "punk spirit" handy for justifying any degree of trespass into baroque, fantastical aesthetics that have nothing to do with the creed of "less is more" and "do-it-yourself." Every now and then, perhaps when the exhaustion of hours-long shows, gruelling tours and endless rounds of interviews starts to take its toll, some musician lets the confession slip: yes, we actually listen to progressive rock too! We draw inspiration from symphonic bands, we try to pick up their ideas and their style!

"While we were finishing 'Frengers', we listened to 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' every night. For the next record, we wanted to move in a more progressive direction." Words from Jonas Bjerre, frontman of Mew, a Danish band among the most original and interesting on the global post-alternative scene.

Armed from the outset with ambition and nerve, the band had already stood out on its early albums for its ability to reconcile opposites: prickly, clattering guitars alongside dream-pop polish, experimentalism and melody, cerebral forms and immediacy. With "Frengers", their first major-label record, the palette gained a fitting stadium rock emphasis thanks to producer Rich Costey (Muse, Mars Volta, Rage Against The Machine), but it's with their fourth album, "And The Glass Handed Kites", that the band's formula reached full maturity, becoming capable of surprising fans across the planet with its unprecedented synthesis, one that would prompt some specialist magazines to reach for the label "alternative prog".

Cerebral, booming, ambitious, tortuous – sometimes elegiac, often or always catchy. By now it's crystal clear what Mew's songs have in common with those of prog's golden age. But where does the difference lie? This isn't the usual new prog, say in the renewed forms of Porcupine Tree, Archive, Landberk?

Just the incipit of the opening track, "Circuity Of The Wolf", is enough to grasp the scale of the difference. A jagged clangour of guitars colliding with one another, three (or more) uncoordinated restatements of the same scraping math-rock riff fighting over the same two poor stereo channels. The indistinct drum racket which, borrowing Brian Eno's masterly trick from "Here Come The Warm Jets", reorganizes itself into 4/4 and, together with the bass, gives structure to the chaos. Forget neo-progressive sweetness: by the time reverbed piano and background choirs finally open up into the melodic surge of "Chinaberry Tree", the listener is already thoroughly dazed by the mighty noise-rock assault.

It's a radical stylistic choice on Mew's part: rather than trying to "update" the psychedelia-prog-neoprog continuity with alternative sounds, they start from the latter and bring it closer to the spirit that animated the inventions of King Crimson, Yes, Genesis.

Could a neo-prog band ever ask a guru of hardline indie-rock like J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. to appear on one of their songs? That's exactly what Mew do on "Why Are You Looking Grave?", drawing on an acquaintance struck up by chance years earlier, when they helped the singer, stranded and luggage-less in Copenhagen, buy some clothes. Over a near-shoegaze whirl of guitars, the track alternates Mascis's hoarse timbre with Jonas Bjerre's brighter vocals: a "meteorological" construction of the composition that then evolves into a play of crescendos and stop 'n' go dynamics with clear affinities to the soft/loud approach of Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Rós.

Iceland's Sigur Rós and the unmistakable falsetto of their leader Jónsi are one of the two key reference points for framing Bjerre's vocal style too (the other – unsurprisingly – being Jon Anderson of Yes). Blessed with one of the widest vocal ranges in rock (B2-G5, comparable to Jon Bon Jovi), Bjerre chooses not to rely on aggression and power but on grace and harmony, favouring, especially on the high notes, a fluted, crystalline delivery. Like Sigur Rós, Mew debuted in 1997: rather than opening up a tedious chicken-and-egg debate, it may be more meaningful to read this coincidence as further proof of the strong musical bond between Denmark and Iceland, alongside their historical and economic ties.

The studied contrast between roughness and grace lies at the heart of Mew's recipe. So is that all there is to it? The four-song run of "Fox Club"/"Apocalypto"/"Special"/"The Zookeeper's Boy" best reveals the other side of the stylistic shift represented by the Danes. These are the four most interconnected tracks on the album, the ones where the influence of "The Lamb" is most perceptible. The songs flow into one another through games of acceleration, deceleration, and rhythms and arrangements that overlap or reduce to a common denominator between consecutive pieces. Mew are, alongside Tool, Meshuggah and very few other contemporary acts, absolute masters of rhythmic interlocking. With one fundamental difference from their metal counterparts: what Mew do is, and wants to be, pop. The riff of "Apocalypto" is a tightrope-walking zig-zag that starts in 10/8 and requires a couple of off-beat hits to lock into the explosive chorus, yet the track manages to be gripping and melodic from start to finish. "Linear" is hardly the right word to describe such an angularly tortuous construction, but the effect really is that of a natural flow, alien yet inevitable, of themes and tempos. As in a Nolan film, the construction is hyper-segmented, yet the narrative possesses an organic quality that makes the mind-screw not only hypnotic and gripping, but also smooth-flowing, and apparently even necessary.

Where does the secret of the band's unrivaled rhythmic machine lie? The following track, "Special", lays its engine bare. Which, once again, is built from well-orchestrated contrasts. And it bears the names of two of the band's members: drummer and percussionist Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen and guitarist Bo Madsen. After the dry, triplet-driven entrance, the former arranges a 4/4 for the song that only at first impression sounds straightforward – you only need to reach the end of the fourth sung bar to run back into that same disorienting triplet filler that opened the track. Without losing the tempo or adding eighth notes, the trick produces an effective rhythmic disorientation: was that a slowdown or a speed-up? The second verse repeats the trick of the first, but the pre-chorus bursts in while the listener is still largely without a compass. And it takes the metrical confusion to a whole other level. What kind of labyrinth is Bo Madsen's riff? It's a torrent of multi-rhythmic, shape-shifting, ungraspable lashes, sounding more like it was played with sandpaper than a pick. I'll note the construction only for the geeks among you: 5/8 + 6/8 + 3/8 + 1/8. Total: 15/8. The drums, which hit every two bars (and every so often throw in their good old triplet filler for good measure), reach the end of the riff offset by 1/8 from the start. And you can't just pick the verse back up naturally, off by half a beat! So here comes the second riff exposition, this time set back an eighth note from the drums: with all the accents shifted, when you do the math it's effectively a different riff (but try noticing that on first listen: you're still reeling from the verse's first tricks…): 15+15=30. Guitar and drums fall back in line, marrying two of the most masterful rhythmic devices in the history of popular music: the "equal-sum" time of Pentangle in "Light Flight" and the verse reinvention through the shifting of the drum beat in "Just What I Needed" by Cars.

You'd best give up from the outset on keeping track of the tempo changes that Madsen strings together in the intro of "The Zookeeper's Boy": there's more math in those twenty seconds of ?-against-four polyrhythm than in the entire career of Don Caballero. What's worth dwelling on, instead, is the architectural function that, here and in other tracks, characterizes the guitar. Two fundamental traits stand out: the simultaneously rhythmic and melodic role of its winding lines, and the timbre's character, at once dry and "panoramic". If the first aspect clearly continues the insights of progressive greats like Robert Fripp, Steve Howe and Alex Lifeson – borrowing in particular from the latter the use of open strings to give the sound more spaciousness – the second owes much to the aforementioned Rich Costey, producer of the band's previous album (as well as of the following "No More Stories…"). The magniloquence of the guitar sound stems from a studio trick already tried out with other bands: the signal coming out of the instrument's effects chain is split via a splitter box across no fewer than four amplifiers, whose positioning in space was calibrated relative to the microphone using white noise so as not to cause phasing on it. In practical terms, it's as if the sound of four guitars playing in unison, coming from different directions, fused together exactly at the point where the recording takes place. Madsen, who would put the technique to good use again on "And The Glass Handed Kites" and all the albums to follow, can thus keep a dry timbre – rationing out distortion and reverb – without giving up any of the grandeur.

Staying on the subject of the sound's key players, there are other names whose contribution is clearly audible in the album's alchemy. One is certainly the producer, Michael Beinhorn, formerly a member (alongside Bill Laswell) of New York avant-jazz outfit Material, co-writer of Herbie Hancock's "Future Shock" and – above all – sound architect for key bands of the alternative generation such as Hole ("Celebrity Skin"), Soundgarden ("Superunknown"), Marilyn Manson, Korn. Mew's idea for "And The Glass Handed Kites" was indeed for an album with very seventies-scaled ambitions, but also for a work with a dark, contemporary feel. Beinhorn's touch was exactly what they were after, and even though the record came very close to being self-produced (Beinhorn's "ok" arrived, after months of silence, only one day before the band entered the studio!), his contribution proved essential not only to the sonic balance but also to the compositional polish of the tracks. It's hard to imagine it being otherwise, given that recording the album required a full five months spent at Beinhorn's personal studio in Los Angeles! Many of the vintage synths that dominate key sections of tracks like "A Dark Design", "Saviours Of Jazz Ballet" and "An Envoy To The Open Fields" also belong to Beinhorn: tracks that, while not skimping on rhythmic peculiarities in the least (have fun trying to make sense of the meter in "An Envoy To The Open Fields"!), come across as more measured and atmospheric than the earlier ones, and usher in a second half of the album more focused on nuance and slow transitions within individual tracks.

"An Envoy To The Open Fields" also marks one of the moments where Johan Wohlert's bass stands out most. A sort of Danish Mike Rutherford figure within the band, his style generally shines far less brightly than that of the other members. Yet his pulsing lines, often the only compositionally clear element in such intricate tracks, represent a decisive rhythmic and melodic fulcrum for the band's pop effectiveness. "And The Glass Handed Kites" would, however, be the last album Wohlert recorded as a full member: the choice to put family ahead of the frenzy of touring life would push him to leave Mew before the recording of the following "No More Stories…", and it would only be thanks to Beinhorn's insistence (also producer of "+/-", the band's sixth album) that Wohlert would return to record with his bandmates.

Also worth mentioning are two other recurring collaborators: Damon Tutunjian and Bo Rande. The former, guitarist of near-shoegazer Boston band Swirlies, produced Mew's debut LP, a major influence on the band's early sound, and here is responsible for the second guitar on "Apocalypso". The latter, a Danish trumpeter involved as a session man in numerous local projects (chief among them the new-choral masterpiece "Parades" by Efterklang), plays flugelhorn on "Chinaberry Tree" and "Why Are You Looking So Grave?" and trumpet on the closing "White Lips Kissed" and "Louise Louisa".

The last two tracks, united by their drowsy tone and running times of over six minutes, offer, from a thematic standpoint, an important occasion to reflect on the album's lyrics. Three traits stand out in "White Lips Kissed" from this point of view: the reference to dreams, the storytelling through disconnected situations, and the emphasis on personal relationships. The lyrical "I" begs the person they love to help them "wake up" from a nightmare, and lists the dysfunctional traits of the relationship, likely the cause of the nightmare itself. Songwriter and singer Jonas Bjerre has explained that his lyrics, rarely autobiographical, often drew on "And The Glass Handed Kites" from the world of dreams, and especially from the feelings left behind by dreams upon waking. His frequent suffering (at least at the time the album was made) from hypnagogic paralysis undoubtedly contributed to the restless, at times negative, character of the atmospheres conjured up.

All three elements mentioned return in "Louise Louisa", which is the longest track on the album thanks to its imposing, dynamic central instrumental section. The connection to dreams is looser here ("I had such a night…."), but from the title alone the emphasis placed on the relational aspect is obvious. Like many other tracks in the band's output, the song explicitly names a person – a device that, by Bjerre's own admission, is meant to make "concrete" characters who are purely literary creations, or at most composites of traits taken from several acquaintances. Staying true to a commitment made early in his career (though abandoned in more recent times), Bjerre systematically avoids using the word "love", and through standalone images suggests the protagonist's fear of both loneliness and the future with its uncertainties, as well as his dependence on "Louise" as an anchor of stability and a guarantee of trust in what's to come. This isn't, however, the only possible reading of the lyric: some fans would have it refer to a fatal car accident…

As Bjerre has clarified in interviews, the interpretive ambiguity of the songs is, if not deliberately pursued, at least well regarded by the band, who on some occasions have directly refused to offer a single definitive reading of some particularly cryptic lyrics. On the other hand, it is again Bjerre who states that the words of his songs are often not built around an explicit meaning, but instead, precisely through fragments of images and situations, try to convey emotions and reflections that, even for the author, sit at a subliminal level.

With "Louise Louisa" the album comes to an end, but anyone listening to the digital version on one of the many streaming platforms will find two more tracks inside: "Forever And Ever" and "Shiroi Kuchibiruno Izanai". These are bonus tracks included on the Japanese edition of the record, the second of which is nothing but a translation of "White Lips Kissed". The attention paid to the Japanese market shouldn't come as a surprise: the Japanese scene, besides being deeply loved by the band thanks in part to some members' otaku leanings, has for a long time been highly receptive to progressive-pop-leaning music, and has in recent years given rise to projects capable of achieving decent international exposure. Gesu No Kiwami Otome and Jyocho, the brawnier Lite, and Ling Tosite Sigure or the evocative Jizue all share a blend of inventiveness and hyperkinetic energy that, while not explicitly recalling Mew's style, at the very least occupies easily comparable territory.

The geographic area where Mew's influence can be felt most directly is, predictably, Scandinavia. Among the bands who have most clearly picked up on the band's ideas, particular mention goes to Norway's 22, authors on "Flux" (2010) of a rather cheesy pop/metal that is nonetheless undeniably indebted to Meshuggah and Mew, and their more restrained countrymen Mirán. By far the best of the bunch, though, are the exhilarating Icelanders Agent Fresco, who across their two albums have thickened and expanded the band's formula, pushing it closer to both atmospheric post-rock and out-and-out metal.

Complex, layered, multi-faceted; rich in nods to other styles; ambitious, cerebral… And yet incurably pop. This is Mew's music, which only a few months after the release of the following album "No More Stories…" guitarist Bo Madsen would describe, almost indignantly, as "absolutely not prog". Sure, of course. Even without the confession of his worthy partner-in-crime Jonas Bjerre and all the traits listed above, the sheer mile-long title of the band's new effort, not to mention its tightrope-walking lead single "Introducing Palace Players" (complete with a video more progressive than ever), would be more than enough to convict Madsen of perjury.

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11/08/2019