I was sheltering from the hail in my local indie record store the other day, flicking though the latest vinyl missives from the precious world of Music No One Buys. This store puts helpful notes on the sleeves about what the record sounds like, and I felt less like I was browsing for pop records, and more like I was cramming for an exam on avant-garde 101. Seems like no one young, white and middle-class can write a pop song any more unless it's based on the life of an obscure 14th-century author-slash-serial killer and played entirely on pre-war synthesisers and different thicknesses of bark. The indie world's response to plummeting CD sales, an increasingly closed-shop corporate pop market, global recession and death by greenhouse gases is, Fuck Dance, Let's Art! It annoys and delights me in roughly equal quantities, which is what both pop and art are supposed to do.
The new albums by Southend's These New Puritans and New York's Yeasayer offer an opportunity for a bit of art-rock compare-and-contrast. Both bands are on their second albums. Both are signed to big, established indie-alternative labels. And both have made the kind of ambitious, complex and innovative long-players that fill you full of admiration for their refusal to accept the internet-killed-the-studio-star logic of making records as a low-budget advert for your far more profitable live shows.
But the pair have come to very different conclusions about this whole reckless sonic adventure thing, which neatly juxtapose America's optimistic ambition and Blighty's refusenik pessimism.
Hidden is one of the most confounding, pretentious and self-consciously intellectual records I've heard in years. It's also one of the most courageous, innovative and rebellious. Apparently inspired by Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, Steve Reich, "and the plastic textures of modern US Pop", it features 43 minutes of mournful woodwind and brass motifs, crunching dancehall-meets-marching-band percussion, drifting anti-song constructions and lyrics such as, "Wear fun death-suit/Tropical design/Blade grammar to the death/Everybody run". If this is making you wonder what exactly was so wrong with three chords and Liam Gallagher rhyming "Soon-sheeeyine!" and "white line", well, you know, I sympathise. But the way that We Want War drags you into some spooky Essex woodland where ancient battle melodies hide in trees while the Wu-Tang Clan jam with the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band in a fishing boat on the Thames Estuary is really, really… bracing.
In stark contrast, Yeasayer's Odd Blood is a piece of piss to listen to, despite a press release that insists that the Brooklyn trio are from "an off-world colony sometime after the singularity" where "glimmering reverb haze is eschewed" in favour of "flickering ectoplasmic wisps". I wasn't sure whether to listen to the record or call Ghostbusters. But once I plumped for the former, I was somewhat shocked to discover a pop record, full of grooves, melodies and recognisable chorus type-affairs. The record revolves around that reverb-heavy, carnival-esque wall-of-sound that has dominated American indie in recent years, and the art part stems from cascading synths, some eccentric percussion sounds and the yearning, nasal croons of Anand Wilder, with plenty of vocal support from fellow Yeasayers Chris Keating and Ira Wolf Tuton.
The reference to an obscure historical figure pops up here in the single Ambling Alp, the nickname given to boxer Primo Carnera. A Nikolai Valuev-type giant, Carnera won the world heavyweight championship in 1933 but was always accused of being a Mob-sponsored false champion. Here, he's simply the thematic launching pad for a big, uplifting chorus that goes, "Stick up for yourself, son/Never mind what anybody else done", which defines the joyful, air-punching feel of songs such as I Remember and Love Me Girl.
While These New Puritans avoid the real world by inventing their own, full of dark beauty and creeping unease, Yeasayer seem to shut out the possibility of anxiety or misery by literally putting their fingers in their ears and singing "LA-LA LA LA-LA!". And while this makes Odd Blood's whirling and skipping electro-pop a much easier and more purely pleasurable listen than Hidden, you know, deep down, that the These New Puritans set is the one that you'll be listening to in a decade, enjoying the fact that you can never quite decipher its codes, and probably being amazed at how many more commercially successful records it inspired.
