Notes on a Conditional Form is an album that seems to have mushroomed out of all proportion. Initially intended as a swiftly-released companion piece to its predecessor, 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it apparently ended up taking the 1975 19 months in 15 studios in four countries to complete. You can tell as much, just from a cursory spin – if it is possible to give a cursory spin to something that’s 22 tracks long and lasts 80 minutes.
The first thing you hear is an ambient instrumental backing a lengthy speech by Greta Thunberg. That’s followed by a yowly punk track, a burst of post-dubstep experimentation, a mainstream pop song, a bit of Radiohead-circa-Kid-A meandering, a song that sounds like Teenage Fanclub, a melancholy acoustic ballad that might have been made for the soundtrack of a quirky indie romcom, something that recalls the more commercial end of baggy-era alt-rock, Radio 1-friendly faux-gospel-infused piano balladry and a guest appearance from FKA twigs. As you reach the hour mark, and they keep piling on the musical styles – sax-solo-assisted 80s MTV rock, a house tune featuring dancehall star Cutty Ranks – the experience feels less like listening to an album than randomly flicking through Spotify. You start to think: God, what next? Technical death metal? Something that sounds like Bucks Fizz? The pipes and drums of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards?
Of course, eclecticism is part of the 1975’s appeal. They started life as the kind of slick alt-rock band that even the NME hated: one reason they’ve vastly outstripped their peers in that musical area is their understanding that we live in an age when generic boundaries and tribal loyalties have collapsed. If everyone likes a bit of everything, why not try and reflect that? This concept has served them well in the past, but their fourth album feels stretched to an incoherent breaking point.
Randomly flicking through Spotify is bound to throw up some duds, and so it proves. There are fantastic songs on Notes on a Conditional Form, where their melodic deftness shines or their desire to experiment yields dividends: Then Because She Goes is beautiful; If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know) and Me & You Together Song are gleaming examples of the 1975’s way with a straightforward pop song; Bagsy Not in Net’s combination of high-drama orchestration and UK garage-influenced rhythm really works, and Guys is an authentically touching depiction of the band’s formative years.
But it’s easy to lose them amid the inconsequential instrumental interludes, the stuff that sounds like throwing ideas at a wall in the hope they stick, or that’s allowed to ramble on past its sell-by: as Yeah I Know or Having No Head amble along, it’s hard not to notice that once the band start fiddling with tech, they tend to forget about writing tunes. You end up applauding their diversity while wishing they’d been a bit more stringent with the blue pencil.
The lyrics, too, are a mixed bag. Matty Healy has a good handle on the complexities and contradictions of millennial life, he’s empathetic – take Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America’s sweet, sad vignettes of closeted gay suburban teens – and he’s frequently funny: hearing a celebrity ex’s song on the radio leads him to protest “they’re mugging me off across a nation”. But he’s also rather too self-conscious in his desire to be the Voice of a Generation: the distorted blast of People is authentically bracing, but the lyrics keep addressing “the kids”, something it’s hard to do without sounding like Rik Mayall favouring the rest of the Young Ones with one of his poems.
Similarly, Healy’s penchant for painful honesty frequently shades into updates on his inability to keep it in his pants that sound perilously close to humble-bragging, and there’s a lot of ponderous self-examination regarding the downsides of rock stardom. In fairness, he seems aware that ponderous self-examination regarding the downsides of stardom is seldom a vote-winner – “have a complain about your fame,” he sniffs at persons unknown, on Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy) – but that doesn’t stop him doing it. It’s a sympathetic soul indeed who hears the opening lines of Playing on My Mind (“Will I live and die in a band? / My consciousness controls my hand”) without an involuntary roll of their eyes.
To all of which, the 1975 might reasonably respond: that’s the point, stupid. They obviously want to be a band that reflects their era. Oversharing, the humblebrag, a surfeit of ponderous self-examination and a self-consciousness that comes from feeling as if you’re always being watched and judged on social media are all – like the aforementioned collapse of music’s generic boundaries and the confusion of abundance with quality – hallmarks of modern-day life. It makes Notes on a Conditional Form a curious thing, an album whose flaws are inherent in what it sets out to do: music for the no-filter generation, with all the good and bad that entails.
This week Alexis listened to
Collard: Favour
Sumptuous, super-soft street soul - if that isn’t a contradiction in terms – that might have been designed to soothe the lockdown-fevered brain.
