Review Summary: Despite a strong opening, the album peters out into listenable, yet ultimately generic, modern rock. Worth a listen, but don’t expect anything mind-boggling.
Whilst albums with openings that far overshadows the remaining tracks are one of my greatest pet hates, ‘Universes’s first three tracks almost make me forgive it. The elevated choruses and concise, uncomplicated writing for every part of the band makes a very appealing combination, as ‘Silhouettic’ in particular hooks the listener from the opening mess of effected guitar and snare drums to the frantic, singalong chorus. If only the rest of the album had followed the pattern.
The opening track acts as a basic guideline to the band’s sound. The driving guitar riffs of ‘Broken Bones’ are both simplistic and thoroughly satisfying, with the soaring if somewhat generic vocals of Ian Kenny acting as an enticing antidote to the crunching guitar line below. The drum work is similarly unspectacular and highly appropriate, with the bass adding another unassuming, deep voice to fill out the standard rock band texture. What really makes this combination is the brilliantly written choruses, all of which feel like a fully realised climax and just make you want to get up and start frenziedly throwing guitars across the room. Though that could just be me.
It’s when the band fails to reach this climax in the choruses that the album begins to subside. ‘Head in my Hands’ being promisingly enough, if lacking the same intensity of previous tracks, but the pre-chorus build-up of a quickly strummed guitar and drums (this band really doesn’t push good ol’, tried and tested musical forms by any stretch of the imagination) seems awkwardly connected to the verse. The stunted beginning and plodding rhythm fails to inspire the same singalong reaction, as the listener begins to sympathise with Kelly’s claims that ‘I hate my melodies, they’re all the same’. Monotony is just fine when the songs are as strong as the opening 3, but after this track, it just begins to grate.
‘White Witch’ has enough groove in the drumbeat to keep it listenable, but again the changing pace and chorus fails the promising, nicely building verse of the song. By ‘Armour for Liars’, the monotonous switching between quickly strummed clean guitar and crunchy powerchords is too predictable to incite any real response from the listener, and the admittedly strong vocals offer nothing new, with the emotion and intensity of the first few songs being simply lacking entirely. The other songs offer very little differently, remaining enjoyable but just not satisfying in the same way that the opening tracks were.
The final footnote to the album, ‘Medicine’ is a decent ballad, although the unnecessarily cheesy strings and background effects make the song a borderline self-parody that appropriately sums up the album as a whole – a predictable, tried and tested formula of modern rock that works best when the band fully commits with intense, driving songs. Unfortunately, the self-conscious attempts to either shake up or parody their songwriting leaves Birds of Tokyo’s ‘Universes’ as an album that cannot break the glass ceiling of ‘predictable yet fun’.
