You may not have noticed, but James are quietly becoming bigger and more important than ever before.
The common myth – as singer Tim Booth has pointed out in promotion for this, their sixteenth studio album – is that the band aren’t popular anymore yet sell more tickets than they ever have.
The point Booth is making, of course, is that the media may not care much for the band yet the people still do, demonstrated by their arena tour later this year and their prestigious headline slot as ‘London reopens’ (and therefore so does the UK…cough, cough) at Kenwood House at the end of June.
There are few bands better suited to the occasion. For nearly forty years James have been consistently harnessing their craft, and few can have a better catalogue of uplifting, crowd-engaging songs: the songs on All The Colours Of You will slot seamlessly into their impressive canon.
Opener ZERO is a bit disconcerting; after mood-setting, glistening ethereal piano, Tim Booth emerges as if through the clouds to inform us incandescently that, ‘We’re all going to die’.
Unquestionably true, if a little morose, but it has long been Booth’s mission to embrace death rather than ignore it. As becomes a pattern across the album, the lyrics are offset by joyously uplifting music, no more so than here.
The chorus consists only of an uplifting cry from singer and band (via their instruments) which culminates in a series of releases, announced by drumrolls, which feel like explosions. Nice and low-key for an opener, it will sound cathartic on the live stage.
Ever since their reformation in 2007, Booth has pulled no punches lyrically. Their comeback album Hey Ma was centred around an anti-war message, and their last album, 2018’s Living In Extraordinary Times, was clearly explicit in its opinion.
With that in mind there are unlikely to be more topical albums in 2021 than All The Colours Of You; the title-track takes systemic racism in the US to task, backed by an unsettling keyboard riff, pounding drums and a general air of unease.
Demonstrating the topicality (whilst proving that we should pay closer attention to the band), Booth wrote the lyrics (‘The President’s your man, he’s the Ku Klux Klan, K-coup, k-coup’) last year, prior to the storming of the White House in January.
Elsewhere, Beautiful Beaches is perhaps their most uplifting song to-date on surface level, a seemingly romantic (and cliched) aspiration of running away to a better life with a musical mix of New Order and Coldplay that makes it a perfect summer anthem.
Yet scratch beneath the surface, and it’s actually a tale of how Booth and his family had to run away from their home to escape forest fires in California. The lyric, ‘We’ll take our chances’, is cleverly inverted as an act of desperation rather than optimism.
There’s no such ambiguity on Recover, a heartbreaking ode to Booth’s father-in-law who passed away during the first wave of COVID-19 in April last year.
The tragic subject matter aside (a personal experience), Booth’s lyrics resonate because of the terminology and processes that were rife last year, in particular the mid-section which evolves from the illness being ‘a cold’ to state that, ‘he can’t breathe without a machine’.
One year on, it’s still just that bit too close for comfort, yet we should never forget, and James know that.
While the three singles so far are the standout tracks from the album, there is still much to delve into elsewhere; Wherever It Takes Us has a house-style verse as Booth scats whilst telling the tale of, possibly, an asylum seeker or, once again, someone escaping a fire, before an uplifting, choir-driven chorus. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
Isabella has some great strangled guitar which pulses along before another high-tempo chorus, and Getting Myself Into is more of a jaunty, old-school British pop song, before once again developing into a mini-epic.
Best of all though is Miss America (‘It’s all snakes, no ladders’), which may sound U2-esque as it begins but it’s hard to imagine Bono being brave enough to draft a lyric such as, ‘Miss America says live the dream as long as you’re born white’.
It drips with sarcasm, rightly so, but once again the beautiful symphony beneath is the first thing to entice the ear.
All The Colours Of You was produced by the legendary Jacknife Lee (the latest in a long line of heavyweight producers to have worked with James), and he and the band have drenched the music in colour (fittingly) and danceable vibrancy without compromising their mission of highlighting societal injustices.
Having outlasted Madchester, Britpop and everything else since, James deserve their place at the top table.
