Альбом 2014 года. Новое творение от английских электронных мультиинструменталистов.
Joseph Mount just can't stay tethered to a moment. Metronomy's 2008 LP Nights Out was the headlong dive into pop's peak-coke gloss, archly tweaking disco, new wave, and all points in between. Three years later, Mount dusted off some old vintage navy blazer and got yacht-rockish for The English Riviera, trading California beaches for the boardwalks of English seaside resorts and almost pulling off the integration.
With another three years passed, Metronomy arrives with another rearview glance at pop and rock history, aging backwards into a gray space between late psych and early glam with a bit of pastoral Kinks ennui mixed in to whatever's left of the old indie-dance pedigree. (He even booked Toe Rag Studios for that special analog-purist touch.) But there's a wide gulf between the idea of Love Letters as pleasant, throwbackish pop-rock nugget and the vapor-thin nonentity it became. What worked for The English Riviera's mellow beachfront reveries—subdued instrumentation, placid vocals, clinical studio-band polish—doesn't stick as well when the tempo's edged back up a notch or two towards something a bit more trad-rock. And what simple-enough songwriting chops there are to this album's credit are delivered so flimsily it's less twee than just plain weak.
If you're looking for a specific culprit, pin that on Mount's voice. Ten seconds and twelve words into opener "The Upsetter", Mount tries pushing his luck at the end of the phrase "straight from the satellite" and creaks out this whimpery Bowie affectation that's a pained balloon-squeak of a noise. It's viscerally grating, and there's more where that came from: When he's not reducing his passionless mumbling to a caricature of a non-committal indie-slacker voice (at its slackest on lite-Kraut "Call Me" and the dozy quasi-waltz "Never Wanted"), he's trying his hand at a fume-drunk midpoint between 60s UK pop and velvety R&B that creaks and shudders under the burden of a voice better built for flatness. Even through a number of permutations—Holiday Inn lounge Motown ("I'm Aquarius"), chirpy analog-organ dance-craze pop ("Reservoir"), drunk-dial Clientele ("The Most Immaculate Haircut")—it sounds like he's holding back, looking at his feet, trying not to cause a scene.
The big shame is that all these side-route trips into oddball drum-machine garage rock or motorik-a-go-go soul had the making of something daringly weird, intentionally out of step with your typical Brit-indie fare, yet still giddily catchy. After three NyQuilcore tracks that make the drum machine from Timmy Thomas' "Why Can't We Live Together" sound like a Clyde Stubblefield/Ginger Baker showdown, the title track feints towards another woozy slog for a bit over a minute before breaking out in a big stomping piano-pounding number that actually shakes the needle. If only the rest of the record caught on to that out-front force—the words on Love Letters might scan as more than lonely fridge-magnet poetry, the beats might feel like more than just placeholders, and the music could be something to dance to instead of just drift off to.
