Review Summary: Biffy Clyro's innocent and justified attempt to wheel out their song writing skills on more conventional ground rolls slowly by without any of the power or skill of their previous efforts.
A fair question to ask before approaching the fourth album by Biffy Clyro is 'where could they go with it?' From 2002 to 2004, they evolved at hyper-speed from quirky, serious emo-sters to full on, whacked out prog explorers; 'Infinity Land' pretty much pushed the limits of the amount of experimentation they could integrate into their music without losing that sharp, purposeful focus that meant that whilst they encouraged the acclaim reserved for progressive artists, they were never accused of the ponderous, deliberately esoteric approach taken by many of those bands.
It seems therefore that three obvious choices were available: make another Infinity Land; try and push the creativity to even higher levels; or simplify. From early on the band made it clear that they were interested in taking the latter approach, and this idea had clear advantages. Primarily it would allow the band to demonstrate their song writing skills in a different way, not always trying to cram their obvious grasp of melody in-between crazy bursts of discordant riffs and jabbering about flirt nausea and mutual nosebleed interests. Whilst the challenging nature of songs which require at least a dozen changes of f-x pedal are a thrill to hear, there have been plenty of great albums built on a much more conventional foundation. Simple does not have to mean less effective.
Unfortunately on Puzzle it does. Make no mistake, Biffy have not completely sold out: despite what many critics have implied, this is not an album produced purely to attract Coldplay-esque sales (this much is clear when Neil sings, albeit melodically enough, "All hands on the courtesy cu*t, get fu*ked stud, I know you will burn in hell"). At the same time, the album is too light indie to appeal solely to the hard rock crowd, yet still too hard rock to become the indie kids' new scene favourite. It simply sounds like a band trying to articulate messages more sombre and reflective than those of previous albums, requiring a calmer and steadier musical vessel than a frequently frantic and constantly cranked aural assault.
So the mere concept of Puzzle does not blow holes in the hull before it has even left the port. There was every possibility that Biffy would pull this off: they're accomplished with melody and have an intelligent side that always demands you take them seriously, despite the name and the song titles, not to mention the sometimes indecipherable and quite frankly nonsensical lyrics. Add to this their aforementioned creative skill with a wide range of musical genres and it's clear that Biffy have all the craftsmanship and all the tools to put together something that would soar high above the mundane, and even the high standards of their own previous work.
'Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies' is everything that 'Bodies In Flight' and 'Glitter & Trauma' were: long, moody and packed with the power of a freight train. The stop-start minute and a half which opens the album is reminiscent of 'Son et Lumiere', opener of The Mars Volta's seminal De-Loused In The Comatorium: the time structure is so arbitrarily off and the banging mash of strings and drums so arresting that it simply holds you in suspended animation until that first line of the song per se comes in. From there the song builds back up again, always pushing forward as it regains the strings and choir, the rhythm and arrangements shifting with startling ease and ingenuity but without that schizophrenic and generally mental air that the likes of 'Toys, Toys, Toys...' and 'Strung To Your Ribcage' have about them. Biffy's power is refined, dense and unstoppably streamlined rather than exploding outwards in about a thousand different directions.
If the rest of Puzzle was this sophisticated then this would indeed be an album of historic proportions. Yet alas the ideas either do not shape themselves in such effective forms or simply do not show themselves at all. Biffy attempt to compensate for the inevitable loss of their own unconventional song segments by incorporating other influences, most notably the contemporary indie sound that they have always flirted with and the 'adult' hard rock which was spawned from the same post-grunge melting pot that Biffy themselves formed out of. The most obvious example of this is 'A Whole Child Ago', with its Silent Alarm verses and There Is Nothing Left To Lose chorus.
However, the latter section of the track, in which they suddenly stop and ask "Why don't you just ask her yourself?" does induce a sharp ringing of the Biffy of old, in this case the deceptively straight-forward but intensely searching stance of the debut, Blackened Sky. This moment of recognition, whereby those old tendencies rise to the surface and you nod your head wryly, 'Ah, so I am still listening to a Biffy record', occurs throughout the album: the menacing, bounce beat injection which intersects 'Now I'm Everyone' recalls the mid-section of 'There's No Such Thing As A Jaggy Snake', whilst the 'Semi-Mental' interlude conjures memories of the hardcore guitar idiosyncrasies of 'Some Kind Of Wizard'.
The fact that 'Get Fu*ked Stud', which is the only song on Puzzle to provide a complete throwback to those crawling-the-walls Blackened, Vertigo and Infinity days, is without doubt one of the most interesting tracks here illustrates the sad fact that stripping away those bewildering and often dissonant eccentricities has also robbed Biffy of what made them a unique and powerful prospect. This Samson scenario means that effectively the songs simply lack signs of any 'higher' skill. There is no sense of a trio of musicians pushing themselves to the edge, either gasping for air as they try to create a spiral of sound to topple whatever anguishes them, or taking a moment to offer a controlled, thoughtful lament to those same troubles. The spiral of sound is now harmless, simple, blunt and uninspired (Saturday Superhouse, The Conversation Is...), and whilst those laments are given a much bigger role to play ('As Dust Dances', 'Folding Stars', 'Machines') Neil's lyrics simply do not measure up to the platform they are given, ricocheting from banal emotional clichè ('In your eyes you can't wash it away from your cold, cold heart", "I would dig a thousand holes to lay next to you") to proclamations so random that they withstand virtually all meaningful interpretation ("Save for a shinbone or even a hand", "At my heart or my throat I'm protected by a hummingbird").
At its base the main criticism offered against Puzzle is its distinct deficiency of anything special. Lyrically the songs say nothing new, nor offer any new way of saying things that have already been said. Musically the band have put down one pioneering torch but failed to pick up (or at least failed to light) another. And to some this might not be such a bad thing. Admittedly the songs often have catchy enough tunes, are well produced and contain a variety of genres, mixed in ways that only a band like Biffy could entertain the thought of. Yet I myself see the fall of such an energetic and vital band, who have previously displayed such a commitment to ambitious musicianship and creating a noise not heard anywhere else, to something so intentionally ordinary, inoffensive and comfortable, as a failed project in itself and a loss to music as a whole.
Key Tracks: 'Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies', 'Get Fu*ked Stud', 'Now I'm Everyone'
