Theme Park - Milk
Wax EP, 2012
: Theme Park are a highly touted four-piece from London who have been top of the chart over at Amazing Radio – where, incidentally, we have a ridiculously entertaining and informative weekly show on Thursday lunchtimes, featuring many of the acts in this column – with their track Milk, for three consecutive weeks. This surely makes them the Adele of digital broadcasting. Three weeks! That’s quite a stint. Whatever happened to the stint? The stint is good. Theme Park are bringing back the stint, the long run at No 1, after years of it being missing, presumed redundant since the heyday of Wet Wet Wet’s Love Is All Around, Meat Loaf’s I’d Do Anything for Love and Bryan Adams’s (Everything I Do) I Do It for You, if indeed that counts as a heyday. It actually looks more like one extended sojourn in hell now that we think about it.
Theme Park, we were just saying, are highly touted, with many of the, um, touts proposing them as fine and worthy successors to the funk-rock mantle previously held by Talking Heads. That is quite a claim. Talking Heads register higher in our own personal pantheon than the Beatles and Dylan combined, especially those first four albums – the 1977 debut and the three follow-ups produced by Brian Eno – so, naturally, we were excited to hear what these two brothers and their two schoolfriends, due to support Bombay Bicycle Club this autumn, could do.
They don’t sound much like Talking Heads, at least not on the first track, Two Hours. There’s a swirl to the keyboards and a goofiness to the vocals that vaguely echoes Once in a Lifetime, but really, the Heads were a once-in-a-lifetime band and they’re not easily mimicked, just as Stones-y raunch and Byrdsian jangle are harder to replicate than indie types ever imagine. The second track, Jamaica, has the calypso tinge and tropical flavour so popular since the emergence of Vampire Weekend (see also Givers), and although it’s nice, it’s no Stay Hungry orCities. Instead of focusing on the brilliant, radical early funk-noir Heads, Theme Park appear to have chosen Speaking in Tongues and Little Creatures – the milder, poppier albums they made between 1983-5 – as the ones on which to base their career.
Milk is their most Heads-like number, to an almost parodic degree. But it’s a bit light and polite. Not that David Byrne and co were rock monsters, but have you heard the three albums they did with Eno? They’re monumental. And they have mammoth heft. They weren’t the precursors of Vampire Weekend – and we really like VW – they were the godfathers of, well, something darkly rhythmic that has yet to be sired. New single A Mountain We Love isn’t bad, if you enjoyed second-album Orange Juice (we did), but the other track on this double A-side, Wax, is a groove in search of a song that just waffles on for several minutes. There’s something here, some intimations of greatness. They just need a greater sense of urgency, which we urge them to pursue.
Phantogram - When I’m Small
Eyelid Movies, 2011
Upstate New York has long been a destination for pilgrims yearning to pare back the excesses of the present in order to reconnect with old ways that have been dismissed as anachronistic by the rest of the world. Phantogram, the pride of Saratoga Springs, one-upped Bob Dylan in the goin’ rustic department by recording its full-length debut,Eyelid Movies,in a barn, though the results are far removed from the all-American re-imaginings of The Basement Tapes. Singer-keyboardist Sarah Barthel and guitarist Josh Carter instead favor the old-timey sounds of languid Britpop melodies, booming old-school drum loops, and other noir-ish, sensuous sonic hallmarks of mid-’90s trip-hop. But even as the influences diverge, the spirit of stripped-down, no-fuss simplicity remains. “You Are The Ocean” rides along on a finger-snap rhythm and an ethereal guitar line lifted from a Massive Attack record, an ideal backdrop for Carter to gush about being swallowed up in obsessive love. Elsewhere, Barthel affects an aloof cool on the lithe “Mouthful Of Diamonds,” dropping a toxic reference to “getting high on your own supply” in the opening line that’s later expressed musically in the amphetamine death twitch of “Running From The Cops.” Eyelid Movies ultimately has more atmosphere than songs, but for a band goin’ down the road to see Beth Gibbons, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The Answering Machine - Lightbulbs
Another City Another Sorry, 2009
A quartet who formed at the University Of Manchester, The Answering Machine released their debut single in 2006 but record company problems have seen this album delayed until now. In the meantime they’ve played at the likes of Glastonbury and currently support Twisted Wheel before hitting the road with Manic Street Preachers.
Sitting comfortably amongst the likes of The Pigeon Detectives and the energetic side of The Kooks, ‘Another City, Another Sorry’ showcases The Answering Machine having a knack for a decent guitar hook. The title track is a flurry of excitable energy while ‘Oklahoma’ is the pick of the upbeat indie-pop from which there is a few to choose from. It gets slightly formulaic and repetitive, but the middle pairing of ‘Cliffer’ and ‘Emergency’ stand out for a passionate vocal and chorus and chilled melodic groove, respectively. A touch of The Pixies can be found on ‘It’s Over! It’s Over! It’s Over!’, while an acoustic riff that aches of melancholy brings the tender ‘The Information’ to life beautifully, augmented further with the use of strings. While they’re unlikely to become genuinely huge off of the back of this album, there is enough here to suggest they can make a name for themselves and may be worth keeping an ear out for.
