When a band like OK GO releases an album little do they know that they have often begotten twins. There’s an album for the Mighty-Joe-average record buying public and there’s an album for us critics. Is it a double-sided metaphor I’m using? You betcha. And what’s more I’m going to exercise my critical right to explain it. That’s how important I am. You are there to sit back and listen. Me? I’m above all that. Me and my kind are naturally at liberty to forsake the buzzing strings and sonic junk of the actual record in favour of pontificating on something as casual as word-association; symbol heavy words and images designed to smooth the progress of a response from your own good selves to a record you haven’t even heard yet; shaping and breaking it as if it had some kind of genetic code or possessed some kind of genetic imperative that would dictate the course of popular opinion regardless of how it actually listened, and which would, god willing, take me back to my original point eventually. But records ain’t like that. Not really.
Like the respect we pay our own children, rarely do we appreciate a record on its own merits. As a rule we tend to get stuck in whatever metaphor or conceit we’ve dreamed up to illustrate it originally; what role we’ve assigned the wee bairn, what friends we wish it to have, which high school we expect it to attend, which Head-Girl or Boy we require it to shag. This is where that funky ‘genetic imperative’ metaphor really kicks in, and if you’ve noticed I’ve even started quoting myself, the inverted ‘commas’ surrounding this phrase an indication that I’m redefining my own position as the most important thing here and giving all the random bits of cleverness I happen to muster in response to the songs I’ve heard a significant priority over those songs at a typographical level. It’s not a signal that I know what I’m talking about; it’s a signal that I really want to talk about me. The actual record gets lost in a maze of gameplay and word-association often precipitated by the press release that comes along with it in a place we might loosely as the conception area. I’d call the press release the umbilical cord between artist and audience but I haven’t even tied up my first metaphor yet, so I’ll spare you the bother. Here’s how we’ll play it: you say Tore Johansson and I say Franz Ferdinand. And before you know it we’ve reduced the core of this witty and fun loving Chicago quartet to little more than another post-punk, art-pop pastiche. We totally miss the point that OK GO released their similarly funked-up and schizoid eponymous debut album some years before those wiry and wordy Glaswegians released their Tore Johansson-produced own. We make our opinion even at the expense of historical accuracy, which just goes to show how bumptious and self-interested we lot really are. The fact that in addition to producing ‘OH NO’ the genre straddling and highly imaginative Tore Johansson produced the very fine gamut of Cardigans albums (the good ones) in tandem with a bag of oddments from Tom Jones to Charlotte Church seems to go largely ignored. We’ve made our decision, we have our angle and we’re going to pursue it mercilessly. Blame the press release though, not me, they were the ones who started it. This is where the atom got split, or to build on my original metaphor, when the egg got split.
You know what it’s like when you’ve created a metaphor? You unleash a monster; a monster with a life of it’s own and who’ll stop at nothing; not even the little blind girl or the boy with the lollipop, a sticky mouth and a balloon. He’ll eat his way through all of them, he will. And he won’t even stop at Godzilla, let alone another metaphor that’s trying to muscle in on his intellectual territory.
Back to big brother: the press release. This is where the record really begins; not in the buzzing strings and sonic junk of the rehearsal intro to total rock out ‘Invincible’ but in the words typed in by their own press office. Why do they mention they’re exhausted after two year’s of extensive touring? It’s better than saying they’ve been lost without a trace for three years struggling to craft anything as bowl-shifting and as addictive as MTV favourite ‘Get Over It’ or ‘You So Damn Hot’. Why not mention up front the beatific posturing of loquacious and charming frontman Damian Kulash, or indeed the actual tracks: the cooing and sexy ‘Oh Lately It’s Been So Quiet’, the exultant Pixie rush of ‘Let It Rain’, the meccanic dancing of ‘Television, Television’ or the robust, jubilant glam-excesses of everything including the hilarious comedy glasses on the ‘Harry Hill’ bald chap? Why, because they’re not necessarily part of the agenda.
Call up the military forward drill of the ‘Ferdinands’ if you will but consider also any one or all of the following: Hot Hot Heat, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Sparks, Maximo Park, Dogs Die In Hot Cars and a big fat dose of fun and originality. Which of the albums you decide to listen to is entirely your choice. My own suggestion is that it’s the one that makes the most noise, the one that makes you nod your head the most and the one that makes least sense.
How much was this review about me or about the album? I’ll let my press office decide. You? You can just tie up the metaphors and assess the significance of the bold-type.