The Singles Jukebox

Tim takes some of us outside our comfort zone with a British experimental rock group…

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Tim de Reuse: Lead singer Harry Burgess wryly calls this “a wedding song:” a hesitant, uncomfortable tune about being welcomed into the institution of marriage (with the “law on my side,” getting “smoked out the closet”). Burgess has sung around this theme of unsettling on nearly every release he’s touched in his career; masculine homosexuality versus the looming white picket fence, the desire for authenticity versus the desire to be shaped, the flaws in our notions of community, family, etcetera. True to form, we’ve got lovely, obtuse imagery that juxtaposes the joy of being accepted with the terror of wishing you didn’t hate the thing accepting you. Does it “take the shape you need,” or does it “piss spray of territory?” Is it “filling you up” or “erasing” you? What’s truly excellent here, what really makes me want to ramble on, is how well the form matches the narrative. Nothing is bolted down; everything half-resolves. The melody is plunked out in gritty cluster chords, first on a playful piano and then in horror-soundtrack cello bursts, first on the beat, then on triplets, then on the off-beat, constantly picking up and dropping rhythmic throughlines. Once the energy steps up the drums seem to be synchronized to the rest of the tune entirely by accident, tom rolls scattering away into unintelligible rhythms. Burgess himself flits between a scared yelp and a smug coo, half victim and half detached observer. Yet it’s got enough of a downbeat and an insistence on melody that it demands to be read not as an academic exercise in communicating discomfort but as a pulsing, pop-crescendo object. It forces you to consider a dissonant, pulsing un-melody in the context of a head-nodding kick-snare-kick-snare; to hear a disjointed 3-on-2 polyrhythm and get the accompanying piano riff stuck in your head. Few bands can ride this line; very few can do this kind of thing deliberately in service of such a particular metaphor.
[9]

Leah Isobel: The sound of modernity: “Bittersweet Symphony” turned inside out and burned to a crisp. More like this, please.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The piano line repetitions sustain a modicum of interest in a rather cute track — the vocalist sounds like Jens Lekman.
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Katherine St. Asaph: What the hell is this twee, herky-jerky, Wiggles-ass vocal? Why do people put this much care and composition into their arrangements, yet fail to realize that the voice is an instrument too?
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Frank Kogan: As this develops, the vocalist cedes the spotlight to the instruments, and the piano (from which you’d expect improvisation) cedes the spotlight to separate blocs of strings. Keeps me interested but — of course — doesn’t attempt to grab me.
[4]

Ian Mathers: No matter how this shifts or settles (or galumphs, as it kind of starts to do when he intones “law on my side, law on my side”) it all feels like one strangely graceful piece. It’s got a shaggy beauty that kind of reminds me of Stars Like Fleas (or their offshoot Family Dynamics), and anyone who can see the old Stars Like Fleas show poster up in my living room knows I mean that positively, even if most people have no idea what I’m talking about. (This is where I would link to the old Stylus review of The Ken Burns Effect, except the internet is not actually forever.)
[7]

Jel Bugle: A little pseudy, and the jerky jazz clank and grind made me feel a little nauseous. Maybe someone else will hear something magnificent here, and that’s the beauty of musical taste. I didn’t even mention the singing.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: “Marquee” feels strangely offbeat, mainly since it shifts in tempo and melody in a way that’s no longer acceptable outside certain corners. It feels unsteady and lurching, feeling its way toward a melody that feels sweet and light but remains earthbound rather than slipping away into the sky. Harry Burgess’s voice, croaky and glum, turns into a chirpy squeak on the sweet ear-candy lyric “Wherever you make home, the deed is done.” Every time you hear that, it’s an anchor in the morass, allowing you the comfort of engaging with music on the level of riffs, hooks, choruses, one-liners, the entirety of popular music. There’s a chorus — “tame emotion, same marquee, found for me” — but it feels tender and gingerly offered, almost as if it emerges as an apology. The “deed is done” line is the response to that apology: a anguished plea to accept that some places you settle, you need to be accepted for your specific impulses and beliefs. But the song ends, dog-eared and mournful, Burgess caging a bird across from him, refusing another the freedom he cannot have for himself.
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