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Whoever’s been part of the Metronomy process, the air of a Devonian mad sonic professor at work has never been too far from the surface.
You say to yourself, ‘Hmmm, you sure, mate?’, when a band like Metronomy give a compilation album the well-worn title Greatest Hits.
Perhaps to rebut that, go to one of the major streaming platforms and somebody has helpfully left all the total play numbers there for all to see, providing enough evidence to show that obscurity and popularity are both relative.
Joseph Mount’s world has always felt like one defined by refusing to be defined; from playing gigs wearing lamps to naming a debut album after a slogan written on the side of a hearse.
In motion for pretty much a decade by the time his/its second album Nights Out arrived in 2008, coincidence meant its splicing together of synth pop, post punk, funk and indie dance aesthetics were modish; timing is everything, and what had been just odd five years before was now odd and on your iPod.
Since Pip Paine (Pay The £5,000 You Owe Me) debuted, Mount has though remained defiantly weird, this in spite of 2011’s The English Riviera being nominated for a Mercury Award and in turn providing a hefty shove towards the mainstream.
Having started out as a solo recording project, by the making of Summer ’08 five years later this was once again the case, but whoever’s been part of the Metronomy process before or since, the air of a Devonian mad sonic professor at work has never been too far from the surface.
It’s best to start Metronomy’s Greatest Hits at the end. Here, listeners can discover the hardscrabble punk-meets-nu-rave of You Could Easily Have Me, a blast from the very distant past that refuses to hold your mocktail for you.
Putting an instrumental on a record like this is usually a trick more associated with Underworld, but not content with one there’s another in the lo-fi bips and bops of This Could Be Beautiful (It Is). Deep cuts? We got ‘em.
Salvage jobs, too. Whilst the near 80-minute concept album Metronomy Forever was an uneven, unedited, ungainly smorgasbord, out of it comes the irresistibly funky disco of Salted Caramel Ice Cream (yum!), Lately’s sinuous purr and Love Letters’ thumping soul, an admirably deft act of self-editing.
But…you’re here for the solid gold, right? And if so, you’re going to be rewarded. Everything Goes My Way is as strangely sweet as it’s always been, a love song that comes straight from the blender of British eccentricity.
And if that’s your Morris dancing and crisp sandwich thing, then you can also revel in the doomed romance of I’m Aquarius, promoted at the time in British stargazing TV show The Sky At Night’s app by playing when you found it in the cosmos. We’re often not a serious people.
If that’s still the sizzle, then the actual sausage is served up right at the beginning. A cynic’s look at the oddness of life by the seaside, The English Riviera is still one of the finest domestic albums of the previous decade, and here The Bay’s sci-fi postcard is dodgems tempting, whilst opener The Look with its movie theatre organ refrain is haunting nostalgia supreme.
You’ll probably need to take your socks off to add up all the plays racked up by these songs, but that isn’t the point; if Metronomy have found mass appeal it was by Joe Mount taking the wrong fork in the road.
Greatest Hits may be an absurd title, but this uneven, messy, sometimes brilliant collection is a perfect summary of a unique talent’s determination to ignore anything that looks like a rule.
