【Pitchfork】the Big Pink/Future This | 15:26 |
Sonically, the Big Pink's 2009 debut delivered. A Brief History of Love's titanic choruses, huge production, and maxed-out volume were designed to explode on the radio. Though they didn't sound like Britpop, the term was applied anyway because the Big Pink seemed in the swaggering lineage of bands like Oasis, the Verve, and Mansun. But bands who emerge so fully formed sometimes lack staying power and, considering Big Pink co-founder Milo Cordell's roots running Merok Records during the cultural peak of blog-house and nu-rave, the band had to be aware of their potential limitations. The follow-up, Future This, finds the Big Pink as boxed in as their predecessors, recycling the same ideas with less conviction.
The drop-off is clear in the album's first few seconds: "Stay Gold" bears blatant similarity to their previous hit "Dominos" but shifts the lyrical focus from consequence-free sex to homilies about staying true to your dreams. It's a troubling thread that runs throughout Future This: where the Big Pink once mastered the role of magnetic, womanizing loners, here their tilt towards positivity and pursuit of a connection with their audience comes off as uncomfortably needy. This results in ill-defined salvos like "Jump Music" that awkwardly try to position themselves as message songs despite having no discernable message.
The Big Pink try to build a mythology by dropping references from their debut into new songs, as if the two lyrically divergent records were of a conceptual piece. They also toss in a reference to the Stone Roses' "I Wanna Be Adored", establishing kinship with another band that was ultimately sunk by not knowing how to follow up a huge debut. And later, "Hit the Ground (Superman)" is every bit as gimmicky as "Stay Gold", incorporating a sample of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" into its halting, Max Martin-like strut and illustrating the fatal flaw of Future This: their need to siphon the power of outside sources-- obvious samples, prefab slogans, even their borrowings from their own music. Where the Big Pink previously sounded invincible, nearly every attempt to intellectualize or streamline their sound makes Future This come off as timid and malnourished.
All of which makes the tender "77" a surprising closer. Touching on addiction and loss, lead singer Robbie Furze sings, "You left such an impression on me/ Left on the debris/ Now I'm all fucked up/ And sometimes I forget I miss you." It isn't exactly poetry, but it does feel unmistakably personal for a band whose most vulnerable song to this point told a lover to leave them alone. It's an awkward start to humanizing the Big Pink, but a start nonetheless. -Ian Cohen
−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−
今回の文は納得できるところが多かったですね。「Stay Gold」は最初聴いたときは「いいじゃん」と思ったんですけど歌詞見てから聴くと微妙な印象を抱いてしまいました。メロディが輝く瞬間はあるんですけどね。
また気が向いたら訳します。
|
| 管理者ページ | RSS1.0 | Atom0.3 | |
(C) 2024 ブログ JUGEM Some Rights Reserved.
|