Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends

Hey, you know who hasn't been the subject of a post in about two days?

The Long Blondes, "Heaven Help The New Girl" - Jesus God, when do I get to stop? I ran out of ebullient praise for the Long Blondes sometime during the summer and I've had to coast by recycling my old material ever since, but up until now they've just been putting out intermittent singles; now I've got to reconcile either my whole existence with their debut full-length Someone To Drive You Home or the other way around, because any brick of songs this uniformly, explosively satisfying can't possibly be expected to just sit on my shelf, yet talking about anything else at this point would be the mp3 blogging equivalent of giving a blowjob to a dildo. So yeah, motherfuckers, we're going to talk about the Long Blondes again, and if you aren't mentally filing the jewel case for Someone To Drive You Home away in your collection by the time I'm done, then we're just going to have to do it again. I got nothin' but time, people.

Having said that, let me state right out of the gate that if you go into Someone To Drive You Home expecting the same level of energy and vitality available on their singles, you're in for something of a disappointment. To be certain, you're also an idiot; singles exist to get their audiences excited about a band NOW NOW NOW, whereas albums tend to be closer to finished products, sentences with periods at the end - in a sense, you might as well hold it against a movie for not being as good as its trailer. But fans of the singles (i.e. anyone with any sense who heard any of the Blondes' singles even just once) should, I think, be warned about stuff like the lack of compression on the vocals or the presence of inferior re-recorded versions of some songs (seriously, new "Separated By Motorways" = OUCH), mostly because this is just the kind of stuff that could prove distracting to a fan obsessive enough to follow a band through their days as a singles outfit in this day and age, and Someone To Drive You Home just doesn't deserve it. I can't shut up about this album because in a very real way, this is it - this is exactly what I would have wanted a Long Blondes album to sound like.

Obviously, this would be my cue to start foaming at the mouth about the new songs or the production or all the little shit like the way the album introduces itself with a song whose chorus goes "EDIE SEDGEWICK! ANNA KARINA! ARLENE DAHL!". The problem, however, is that I could pretty much say the same thing about the most recent Strokes album - in fact, I kinda did - and apart from the other cultural Fifth Columnists who haven't thrown the Strokes away completely yet, that's not exactly the kind of comparison bearing a lot of promise. I mean, what was First Impressions Of Earth if not fourteen tracks' worth of unbroken Strokes canon? Hell, even when they're breaking the rules on that one, they're doing so in a predictable way ("Last Nite":"Juicebox"::"Hey, the Stooges":"Hey, the Cramps") - something, I might add, which you can absolutely say about Someone To Drive You Home, especially towards the middle of the record. So how come it's tired and boring for the Strokes to make a record like that, but hip and refreshing when the Long Blondes do it?

Well, uh, because it's really not. As best as I can tell, the only difference between First Impressions Of Earth and Someone To Drive You Home is that the Long Blondes' guiding principles haven't been trumpeted all over the cover of every music-related magazine since the day America decided it was OK to pay attention to music again, and as a result it's still thrilling to hear their formula more or less successfully stretched over the course of a full album. What's uniquely great about this being the case for the Long Blondes, however, is the fact that by this point, I've had almost two years of exposure to not just their singles but their uniformly excellent b-sides, and as a result I've been both waiting on tiptoes and curling up into the fetal position in anticipation of hearing how - hell, if - they'd be able to maintain their level of consistency over the course of a whole record. To hear them actually pull it off is almost reward enough by itself, but to hear them pull it off in the form of a record as inviting and engaging and relentless as this one calls for nothing less than a ticker-tape parade; even the album tracks on Someone To Drive You Home practically come dipped in the Blondes' essence. I mean, no matter how atypically murderballad-esque "Heaven Help The New Girl" may be, it's still basically just your average workaday Blondes song about dissatisfaction with the male gender (and I do think it's important to distinguish between Kate Jackson's poisonously articulate lyrics and the more generally familiar songs she writes - just because these songs are about girls yearning their days away for boys who can hold up the other end of a fulfilling conversation about Scott Walker records doesn't mean you have to dig too far to reach the point where they become songs about girls yearning for boys), but if it takes you more than two seconds to figure out (1) just how it's a Blondes track, and (2) just how they had to rejigger their approach in order for it to be recognizable as such, you haven't been paying attention. The thrill is in the familiarity; the genius is in the arrogance motivating such a small-time band (all things considered) to claim it. And they claim it by staking a flagpole into your forehead twelve times. That is how an album should work, people - or at least if you want to foster an audience incapable of shutting up about it.

"Nineteen/You're only nineteen for god's sakes", Jackson sings on "Once And Never Again", Someone To Drive You Home's second song and most recent single, and in a way it sum up every second of the rest of the album: it hints at a perspective of being older (but not old enough to where the joke's not funny), wiser (but not necessarily superior), and more accomplished (if not necessarily complete). There's no doubt in my mind that the Long Blondes have it in themselves to top their debut album - it'll definitely take some doing and they may end up spending the rest of their careers making album after album in an attempt to do it, but as as long as they stay capable of filtering their lives through the sieve of pop music, it's still a distinct possibility. If there's one lesson Someone To Drive You Home has to teach, after all, it's that the Long Blondes unequivocally know what they're doing; now it's just a matter of continuing to do nothing else. (Click here to buy Someone To Drive You Home from Rough Trade)

The Knife, "Parade" - Motivated as it was by my atavistic desire just to own the entire discography of the greatest band working today, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that it took until the sixth song for the Knife's self-titled debut album to fully justify itself. Not that the preceding five songs sucked, mind you - "Kino", neutered compared to the live mix though it may be, is still "Kino" - but across the board they were all pretty unidiomatic, and as a result the album had to claw and scratch to retain my attention during my car ride, which I've come to realize is more or less a, if not the, kiss of death for an album (when I'm driving, after all, my mind is fixated on not plowing through clumps of pedestrians, not on deciding whether or not I like beguilingly unhinged Swedish synthpop). Then "Parade" wound itself into existence and all of a sudden I was backtracking myself practically into the womb again; between that loping martial beat and that super-clipped guitar (!) and those squelchy bagpipes alone, you can practically hear Karin and Olof going "OH GOTCHA, THIS IS HOW WE SHOULD PUT A SONG TOGETHER". And then, of course, the curtain gets pulled up on the chorus, and from that point on the album - if not the Knife itself - becomes something very special indeed; in the space of that one chorus swell, Karin and Olof seemingly completely abandon the pretense of giving a fuck about their audience's expectations and start making their music, because clearly if they can wring that kind of drama out of some bizarre little digital oom-pah experiment, the audience's expectations were just going to have to wait. I'm sure that this was hardly a new conclusion for the Dreijers; I'm confident that they'd settled on a whole host of rigorous methodologies before ever sitting down to record The Knife, and given my experience with both Deep Cuts and Silent Shout I'm even more confident first five tracks' Knifeliness ought to be revealing themselves in good time. But all I know is that, placed where it was on the album and in the continuum of their aesthetic, "Parade" sounds for all the world like the moment when they just got it, and given that that moment's rare enough in this line of consumption (to say nothing of when it's the best band on the planet 'getting it'), it feels deserving of a mention. (Click here to buy The Knife from Amazon.co.uk)

Guillemots, "By The Water" - Lest you come to consider me some brainless puppet autobacking whichever horses he happened to throw his saddle upon at some far-flung date in the past, allow me to just say that the new Guillemots EP Of The Night is really, really bad. For true fans, of course, it's still a compulsory purchase - hell, given the way history tends to sort out contrarian opinions on pop music, I'm sure the consensus will be that Of The Night is far and away their most creative moment in a decade or so - but curious nonbelievers or even just fans of the band's music who don't happen to have any particular investiture in the band themselves are urged to look elsewhere, because apart from "By The Water", there's only fleeting moments of the kind of triumphal arrangements and joycore songcraft that you'll find on Through The Windowpane or any of the other EPs. Hell, you could pretty easily argue that Of The Night exists specifically to repudiate their more enjoyable leanings; the EP opens up with a plodding New Rave number (no, seriously) owing a substantial debt to the Presets and ruins its pentultimate track, a nine-minute samba shakedown, with an embarassing two-minute stretch introducing the band by their stage names while the track rapidly detumesces into some sub-Feist lite-jazz bullshit (again, seriously). Thank god, then, for "By The Water", the only track on the EP with the same kind of rapturous musical logic as their better moments - when the chorus starts OOOOOHing away in the background, it practically cuts through the unpleasantness fostered by, well, everything else present. Given my insane and unabated fandom of the band in question, part of me wonders whether this might have been the whole point of the exercise - make something uncharacteristically unpleasant, then wipe it away entirely with something devastatingly characteristic in temper and approach. I may not like the EP, but if that was their approach, I also can't deny that it was an unqualified success. And if not, who gives a fuck? Even Blondie let me down from time to time, after all. (Although the Of The Night EP isn't for everyone, if you're even a little interested in owning it, I would urge you to act quickly as it was printed in a pretty limited run; click here to buy it directly from Fantastic Plastic's shop.)

Okay - now I swear I won't talk about any of these artists until it's end-of-year-list time. Pinky-swear, even.