Review Summary: Everything Everything tread familiar ground on their second LP and once again achieve great results.
When 2010’s
Man Alive was released, critics and fans praised Everything Everything for having a fresh, unique and exciting indie-pop sound akin to (but not derivative of) Vampire Weekend. Not much has changed for 2013’s
Arc, as the band repeat the same winning formula with some added polish, but the second time round there’s just a little less fun to be had.
Starting off the album with lead single “Cough Cough” was a logical move. It would have sounded right at home on
Man Alive with its jittering synths, abrupt sonic shifts, and frontman Jonathan Higgs’ sometimes-manic sometimes-melismatic falsetto. But while Everything Everything are perhaps best known for being idiosyncratic (see “Torso Of The Week” and “Don’t Try” for other examples), there’s a lot more to them than that.
The eccentricity is toned-down in mid-tempo highlights “Kemosabe”, “Duet” and “Radiant”, where the band’s skills in songwriting and lyricism are highlighted instead. They reveal that at Everything Everything’s core, they may be utilising quirk as a musical façade for insecurity (“Hey Kemosabe I’m alone”) and apathy (“I don’t wanna think about it all, I’m tired”, “I could make a difference but I don’t”). “Choice Mountain” abounds with references to the evolution of species, but it’s all metaphor for the band’s own journey. When Higgs cries out, “Somewhere there is a place, and I could be a pterodactyl God”, it’s an appropriately absurd (this is Everything Everything after all) declaration that the band aspires to be something even greater.
As a sophomore album,
Arc has no obligation to innovate from its predecessor, as the band is still testing their sound and seeing what works best. Not to say that they’re merely throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, which is how you could have described
Man Alive. Their compositions are more thought out this time around and production value has increased. However, late-in-the-album ballads “The Peaks” and “The House Is Dust” sound dulled down, more Coldplay than EE, and the clean-as-a-whistle instrumentals hunger for a layer of grittiness that was there in “Suffragette Suffragette” and “Weights” from Man Alive.
By emulating their debut, Everything Everything have lost some of the shock-factor and unpredictability that made
Man Alive so exciting.
Arc therefore earns its greatness in other areas: its improvements in the songwriting’s maturity and the lyricism’s intelligence, and the band’s revelatory pursuit of a grander and more consistent identity.
