Review Summary: The most infuriating musical cocktease
Let me start this review off by saying how little hype for this album I personally experienced. Before this album, and having given neither band a proper listen, I’d kind of conflated The 1975 and The xx into the same boring, minimalist drivel, what with their boring, minimalist cover art and floppy, Brit-indie aesthetic. I wasn’t a fan going into this album, and while–spoilers!–I did enjoy it, I don’t know if I’ll be able to enjoy their debut as much. If The 1975 are a one trick pony (not that that’s a bad thing, mind you) and if “when you sleep” is the same trick but with a bit more stuff, I can’t imagine going back to that first trick and having it sound anything but derivative. I expect it would be like watching Pan’s Labyrinth now and then going back and watching Guillermo Del Toro’s student films. Or something. I don’t know. But I digress.
The album starts off with a slow striptease whose sexy haze is quickly disrupted by an incredibly funky punch. There’s an intro (entitled “The 1975”, just like the intro to their first album–yeah, that’s not going to get confusing) which dances around with some bassy ambience and Bon Iver-esque vocal waves. It’s there and then it’s gone, and as interesting as it is, it never really ties into the rest of the album as a whole audio-wise; as someone who listens extensively to instrumental music, I’m afraid I also can’t speak much for The 1975’s lyrical content, but it doesn’t appear that any lyrical themes developed in “The 1975” come back to haunt the record, either. This isn’t an album that spends much time developing any particular concept beyond “fun pop songs about sex and other trashy things like money and fame and whatever”.
None of the songs following the intro really make their own sound. There’s a lot of very interesting–if ridiculously saccharine–electronics dancing in the backgrounds of these cuts, and while I found myself noticing some almost absurdly cliche chord progressions, there was enough happening instrumentation-wise that it usually didn’t become too distracting. This is pop music, after all, and you can’t really criticize a Michael Bay movie for having too many explosions. There is, however, a point where genre restrictions (and The 1975 do feel very restricted and formulaic at times) become a little too noticeable. “If I Believe You” is just a Heavier Things-era John Mayer track with a few more synth wobbles, for example. To be fair, this may say more about John Mayer than it does about The 1975, but the fact that everything about The 1975 from their name to the neon-laden minimalism of their album covers screams “nostalgia bait!” makes me a little bit skeptical of the ability of this group to do anything really unique or special.
Of course, as I say that, immediately after their John Mayer imitation comes their Sigur Ros imitation. I can’t really sin “Please Be Naked” for anything in the song itself; there are a lot of interesting post-rocky ideas bouncing around in here and I find the slightly aggressive take on ambience that they manage to bring to a boil here genuinely moving. It does, however, feel very jarring in contrast to the heavy pop funk that I’ve been lulled into by the first few tracks. It’s like an instrumental “The 1975 Part II”, but it feels very oddly placed. It’s only when “Lostmyhead” starts, another post-rocky jam (this time with vocals!), that “Please Be Naked” is really given a reason for being there. Unfortunately, I can’t really think of what that reason might be. “The Ballad Of Me And My Brain”, which follows “Lostmyhead”, is an almost Postal Service- or Dntel-esque electronic jam which would have fit in just fine with the first segment of the album, and everything following that is in the same vein. So why did The 1975 feel the need to put “Lostmyhead” and “Please Be Naked” in this album at all, especially with the bloated, hour-long runtime of the album? They’re decent cuts, and I didn’t dislike them by any means, but they would have fit much better as, perhaps, a separate EP with a more atmospheric, ambient focus, especially after hearing “How To Draw”, the Imogen Heap-esque bonus track slapped on the end of this already ridiculous behemoth almost as an afterthought. Hell, even a double album with more of a focused theme for each half would have been an interesting move. I never thought I’d criticize a pop band (and this is a pop band, no matter how well disguised) for bringing too many sounds into an album, but that’s what I’m doing here.
The two more acoustic-focused cuts at the end are nice, but at this point it’s like walking into a Chinese buffet, giving yourself a bit of an appetizer, some scoops of entree, some jello, and then having your douchebag cousin bully you into going up for more again, and again, and again, even though if you wanted more you should have just saved the jello for last, you idiot, and you didn’t even really want to be here in the first place and even though it’s actually a pretty decent buffet, there’s only so many kinds of fried rice you can try before wanting to just go away for a while and never look at ginger beef again–oh, and now he’s trying to get you to have a jello eating contest and you guess you might as well do it because you’ve come so far anyway and there’s only really enough jello for one or two little cubes each.
Essentially, everything I can say about this album can be inferred by looking at its distended title: a(n) (pseudo?)artistic dance through pop, funk, and indie musical tropes with a little genuine innovation thrown in every once in a while, but it’s a dance that goes on just a little bit too long, and now your feet hurt and all you really want to do is go home and listen to something a little less polished and saccharine. The problem isn’t so much that this is a dumb pop record, it’s that it’s a dumb pop record that proves it can be more than a dumb pop record, but rather than developing and expanding on these themes throughout the album, forces them into a few awkward tracks that, in the context of the whole thing, feel very out of place and uncomfortable.
It's an okay album, and I absolutely loved just putting it on when I did something else, but there's very little here that makes me interested in what they have yet to produce. I don't know if they're going to be making anything more interesting, because when they do manage to grab my attention with something interesting and from-left-field, they make no attempt at holding it. Essentially, the 1975 are little more than the most infuriating musical cocktease I have heard for a while.
