Album Review: Metronomy – Metronomy Forever


Metronomy Forever



There’s no need to include Metronomy in the ‘is music getting weirder?’ discussion taking place almost constantly in the L4E office.

They’ve always been out there, stuck in an eclectic orbit around pop’s sun which began with 2006’s Pip Paine, Pay The £5000 You Owe, an alchemy which has preferred to quietly make taste rather than observe it.

This wilful laissez-faire attitude has made their success – which peaked with 2011’s storytelling masterpiece The English Riviera – all the more revelatory. It’s a profile which the band’s creative hub Joe Mount has broken down on Metronomy Forever, their sixth release and one about which he theorises: ‘The less importance you place in any art the more interesting it can become in a way…I’m making music, I’m going to do some concerts, I need to feed my children.’

Maybe in that case the album’s title is a joke at Mount’s own expense, like a child’s graffiti written on a toilet wall. Either way the contents are, over a near 80-minute span which he’s claimed is designed to mirror the looser experience of listening to the radio, a look inside the mind of a songwriter freed from the shackles of hit making.

Despite the lengthy running time there’s a still a sense of momentum, partially generated by having a quartet of brief interludes – opener Wedding, the kinetic accelerations of Driving, Insecure’s white noise and the dreamy, lovesick closer Ur Mixtape. This isn’t strictly Mount’s turf, but the little contrasts offer depth, helping to pique the listener’s interest in the ‘normal’ stuff around them. There’s the brittle, pretty synth pop of Lately for instance, the underplayed soul of The Light and Whitsand Bay’s bubbling disco offcuts, all of which are the band stood back in their own halo, moments of satisfying drift.

Not that things don’t get big on occasion: the glam rock antics of Insecurity, with lyrics that take a swipe at manning up, have an unconscious swagger, Miracle Rooftop is a house banger drip-fed through a warped Aphex-style filter, while the familiarly offbeat cadences of Lying Low could’ve been taken from almost any of the band’s previous releases.

It seems everybody is talking about creative freedom these days, but there’s a difference between understanding that and making something good from the consequences. Mount’s work with Robyn on her Honey album was the inspiration which gave birth to Salted Caramel Ice Cream’s overdose of funky carnalism, but those who like it odd will be simply thrilled by Sex Emoji, the non-sequiturs raining down like broken poetry – structurally though, it’s all over the place.

Is it weird? That’s all in the ear of the beholder. Metronomy’s longstanding scholars are used to their foibles, but the characters here feel harder to love than normal, the musical ideas sketchier.

Metronomy Forever makes its statement by not really having one – it could be a last act or the beginning of a new chapter, a riddle only its creator knows the answer to.



7/10

(Andy Peterson)


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