Review: Metronomy – ‘Love Letters’


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In amongst all the critical and commercial bouquets that Metronomy‘s last album ‘The English Riviera‘ earned, (headlines: Mercury Nomination, more than 100,000 copies shifted) it became hard to remember the band had been a very much a cult proposition up until its 2011 release.

In the beginning, music under the name had been largely the work of frontman Joseph Mount, mostly too left field to swim with the late noughties tide of vintage synth-prodding haircuts.

This changed with ‘The English Riviera’ for a number of reasons, one of which being that Mount chose as his muse his bohemian Devon home town of Totnes, another that his subtle blend of British archetypes – Bowie, New Wave, add a dash of Eno period Roxy – were rounded out by the addition of band personnel who added necessary soul to the formerly anaemic concoction. Confounded by the sort of success which most of his few peers could only dream of, you might have expected Mount accordingly to broaden the appeal still further, pushing out for the arena market having been given an unlikely opportunity to do so.

You’d be wrong though.

Put bluntly, ‘Love Letters‘ is less of a progression than between any other Metronomy album to date; this however is a good thing. Recording in an all analogue studio (London’s Toe Rag) would probably have been considered a perverse choice for a band who’d been mangling electronics around since the beginning, but this lack of available trickery suits these songs, most of which are low key, fragile and blanketed by the weirdness of 21st century living.

Typical, opening track ‘The Upsetter‘ kicks off with some mournful Farfisa and the strum of an acoustic guitar, Mount’s thin voice at the upper end of its register, sometimes wavering slightly. It’s vulnerability like this which makes Metronomy more approachable; ‘I’m Aquarius‘ is a love song in reverse, deceptively simple but bearing a long lost quality in being charmingly repetitive enough to tunnel into the darkest corners of the brain.  Those who expected the mainstream to have been tilted for have to wait until the title track before they point excitedly to a songwriter ‘going for it’. Dipping his oddness in a thumping set of bygone tones, the chorus is as unabashed as any Mount has ever written, tambourine and piano glossed together with a trumpet that begins framed in Hovis tones but ends up tooting like Louis A.

It’s an outlet for some fun, the kind Mount seems to be fuller of than perhaps you’d think on first listen. Tongue in cheek or not, ‘Reservoir‘ beeps and bonks along with a frisky energy, a sort of OMD gone boffin schtick, whilst instrumental ‘Boy Racers‘ resembles the passive disco of Royksopp’s gloriously off kilter début ‘Melody AM‘.

Whilst there are signs of being more than willing to press the F button, the singer’s desire to avoid doing a Snow Patrol is both admirable and observed dogmatically. There isn’t, for instance, anything with the immediacy of ‘The Look‘, the last album’s brain-annexingly superb highlight; instead the likes of ‘The Most Immaculate Haircut‘ and closer ‘Never Wanted‘ are welcoming in their own way, the latter’s rejoinder, “But it gets better”, coining a phrase which Metronomy as a whole must’ve heard more than a few times recently.

More of a second verse than a new chapter, ‘Love Letters’ is the sound of a band reluctant to take the easy choices – and we should be thankful for that.



(Andy Peterson)


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