Review Summary: The brilliant is brilliant, what’s not brilliant is tragic, and somehow even the brilliant is a little bit tragic.
There are many pros and cons to being the child of wealth and celebrity. The pros are obviously the access to opportunities and resources that others would have to work much harder to acquire, if they even could at all.
Artistically this could surely only be seen as beneficial, having more time to devote whilst also having to work less hard is the kind of double win that surely sets you on a path to success if you just apply yourself.
That being said, there is a degree of democracy beyond the gatekeepers and if you fail to connect with your audience, who largely speaking do not have the same privilege as you, you won’t be able to carve out a career in popular culture.
The degree of confidence to try privilege gives you, is also a double-edged sword. While someone like Lena Dunham was lauded for her work on Girls, we’ve subsequently seen how thinking your every thought is great and worth sharing with the world has led to her somewhat ostracization due to just how problematic she actually is.
The ‘warts and all’ approach to creating art often gives you lots of hits but having never had to develop empathy and self-awareness in the same way leads to many misses. Being an adult who’s allowed to be the centre of their own universe in an extended adolescence is incredibly liberating for the individual but likely utterly tedious for anyone who has to deal with you.
Matt Healey has built a career with The 1975 dancing on this very fine line. When he and the band are good, they are amongst the best pop rock acts in the world right now and when they are bad they are infuriatingly pretentious and self involved.
‘Notes on a conditional format’ flays wildly between these two extremes from song to song. It’s almost impossible to accurately reflect the quality of an album that features two of the best pop songs of the year in Me and You Together and If you’re too shy (let me know) along with lots of genre hopping filler that really doesn’t need to be there. Even those better moments are held back by Healey’s stock in trade absolutely terrible lyrics delivered completely earnestly.
It is absolutely unnecessary for anyone to listen to this record in full and truth be told, I couldn’t even make it through it to write this. Life is too short, even in the midst of a pandemic where we are all at home.
This however, is exactly what makes them such compelling pop stars. The brilliant is brilliant, what’s not brilliant is tragic, and somehow even the brilliant is a little bit tragic. To borrow a phrase, In a world where the only thing some pop stars bring to the table is a chair, a band this ambitious, earnest and chaotic are utterly un-ignorable.
If you stripped them back to the thing they are best at, blistering pop rock singles, their career would sink without a trace. Exposing all their worst bits to the world at the moment, is just making them more compelling.
This is postmodernism with all the best tendencies of a Madonna’s mercurial magpie approach to stealing any ideas that aren’t nailed down. This is What I imagine it would sound like if Shonda Rhimes created a pop rock band.
They just have to make sure that the good keeps counter balancing the bad and that Healey doesn't earnestly say anything too problematic.
