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Debut album ‘The Decline of British Sea Power’ combined the increasingly popular core influences of Joy Division and The Pixies with an unashamed and deeply unfashionable flavour of British pride and home-counties rural sensibilities. Much is made of their stage appearance (dressed in World War era military paraphernalia, standing among tree branches, plastic birds of prey and assorted taxidermy) but what’s really remarkable about this band - and what the casual observer could at first miss - is the way that this visual image is so accurate a representation of the music. And so it is with ‘Open Season’, a record so full of eccentric, quirky insight and mystical tales of countryside adventure that there’s really only one place it could have come from. While some fans may miss the fast, brutal, feedback-laced burnouts of their debut (and certainly the live experience has lost a little clout since introduction of the new material), they should find themselves more than compensated by the sheer quality of slower tracks on offer here. Subject matter varies from yearning for the comforts of home to the essential sanctuary of daily unconsciousness (“Eight hours a day / call it twenty years / there’s a place you can go / free of lust stupidity”). The Joy Division comparisons are sure to stop, only to be replaced by recent Pulp and a few fleeting glimpses of Pavement/Malkmus and Echo & The Bunnymen. While favourable, such comparisons are rather redundant, as British Sea Power have carved a niche for themselves that truly merits that most hallowed of adjectives, ‘unique’. Progressive and nostalgic in equal measure, every chord, every note, every line of this music is so delicately enthused with the overriding ethos of the band that the listener is instantly transported within the head of whichever character British Sea Power choose; be it a WW2 evacuee, a hallucinogen-fuelled reveller experiencing religious epiphany or a lonely traveller preparing to break free from their isolation to return from whence they came. The very best elements of our national character run through this album as they would through a stick of Brighton rock, and it’s so good you could be forgiven for momentarily forgetting about the very worst ones as well. - Ben Healy
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books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. film  film archive The best of cinema in the UK from 2002 to 2008. |
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