MACCABEES - Given To The Wild

It was to be expected, after all. The news (regardless of the UK charts and the NME covers, won without the slightest effort) is that the Maccabees have taken the great, decisive step. A work like "Given To The Wild" speaks for itself: the band we find in the grooves of this album has now given itself over to full maturity. The London quintet had already put forward a host of thoroughly persuasive arguments with their debut album "Colour It In" and, above all, with the following "Wall Of Arms", records that sprouted in the shadow of ravenous wave infatuations (Teardrop Explodes, early XTC, The Sound and the like) yet still able to assert the superior inspiration and millimetre-calibrated stylistic substance of a young band clearly destined for a great future. A future that now arrives to shine and glory in its own reflection on the luminescent surfaces of "Given To The Wild".

The record (written and recorded with old-school craftsmanship across different places and times, from London to Suffolk) boasts production from names of unquestionable weight such as Tim Goldsworthy of DFA and Bruno Ellingham, and it asserts itself firmly from the very first listens through the balance of its broad compositional structures, through the space and volumes that breathe imperiously between one sound and the next, and through the dazzling perfection of many of its melodies, starting with the complex, sinuous movement of the gorgeous single "Pelican", which is worth almost a whole career on its own.

Faced with the limpid elegance of tracks like “Child” or “Ayla”, steeped in suspended visions and pure vertigo, one's mind returns to the luminous precedent of “Total Life Forever” by Foals: similar is the broadening of perspective that led the Maccabees to boldly open their eyes to the world and to the pulse of their own lives within it, similar is the expansion that their musical gesture has gained as a result (the arching surge that opens up “Feel To Follow” speaks for itself).

“Given To The Wild” is an album of hyperboles, one that calls up vast spaces starting from its very title and that knows how to draw those spaces with a supremely pliant touch within the flow of a music that is happily dreamlike and endlessly reshapeable. Although some of the arrangement choices (above all the almost orchestral cut, with horns pushed to the fore, of several passages, such as “Child” or “Go”, wrapped in electronic bandaging) might recall mid-period Arcade Fire (one can hardly forget, after all, that the band has worked in the past with Markus Dravs), the Maccabees, especially in the electric crescendos of “Forever I've Known” or “Went Away”, reassert the strength of a voice that is original and fully recognisable, hard-won over time and, more importantly, faithful only to itself. A fidelity that brings the band close to the most inspired creations of Elbow and Wild Beasts, and that allows them to brush up against results of the most refined metaphysical landscape-painting, worthy of a Kate Bush (“Unknown”), a reference explicitly invoked in interviews, rather than a Mark Hollis (“Slowly One”).

In “Grew Up At Midnight”, Orlando Weeks's ethereal and sensuous yet incisive voice thus seals a small diamond of contemporary art-pop, bringing out its prismatic light in a myriad of scattered shards and reflections. An album with gold in its mouth.

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14/01/2012