Open Season

Fed up of gloomy, personality-free bands? British Sea Power will save you.

Midway through British Sea Power's second album comes North Hanging Rock. It is a more limpid and beautiful piece of music than you might expect from a band known for live performances that regularly culminate in unpredictable, slightly disturbing onstage violence. Their appearance at last year's Glastonbury ended with one of their number plunging headfirst from the stage, another pelting the audience with tree branches then recklessly swinging a large plastic bird at their heads, and the remaining members clambering up on each other's shoulders, picking their way through the debris, pursued by a man who had taken to the stage clad in a giant bear costume. It should be noted that this was among British Sea Power's more restrained shows.

On North Hanging Rock, however, all is serenity. Beneath lambent piano chords and graceful arcs of feedback, you can just make out the twittering of birds and the crunch of leaves underfoot. Frontman Yan's voice is a beatific whisper: "Drape yourself in greenery, become part of the scenery." He's singing about death, but he could be singing about Open Season itself. It sees British Sea Power attempting the most awkward trick in rock: broadening appeal beyond cult-dom without sacrificing uniqueness.

That uniqueness is beyond doubt. Other bands may share British Sea Power's musical influences - artful post-punk angularity, the Pixies' squalling guitars, the unsettling, Wicker Man end of English folk - but none shares British Sea Power's obsession with the arcane corners of modern European history, their penchant for dressing in puttees, their willingness to decorate their stages with foliage and stuffed birds. Unless you include the brief and unhappy period in which Bill Oddie piloted the Goodies' string of 1970s hits, British Sea Power count as the first rock band in history with a pronounced interest in birdwatching and rambling.

They could be the most original and intriguing band in Britain, yet you can see why British Sea Power have previously scared the more delicate music fan off. Their debut, 2003's The Decline of British Sea Power was less an album than a kind of aural assault course. It contained beautiful, elegiac songs. To reach them, however, you had to navigate tracks apparently designed to send all but the most committed listener fleeing in fear of their life, including the doomy cod-Slavic harmonising of Men Today Together and Apologies to Insect Life, which largely consisted of the line "Oh Theodore, you are the most attractive man" screamed repeatedly with mounting dread and hysteria.

Two years on, common sense seems to have prevailed. Open Season bowls up bearing a surfeit of songs you could imagine making Radio 1 a more tolerable place. It Ended On an Oily Stage, Be Gone and Please Stand Up offer epic pop decorated with vast, effortless choruses; True Adventures is a delicious ballad, slowly devoured by gusts of guitar noise. Oh Larsen B, meanwhile, is the catchiest song ever to concern itself with the fate of a collapsing ice shelf: "You're fractured and cold but your heart is unbroken," gasps Yan. "My favourite foremost coastal Antarctic shelf."

The journalist Stuart Maconie once noted that you could quickly discern Morrissey's singular genius by the frequency with which he used words never normally heard in rock songs. As Oh Larsen B suggests, the same goes for British Sea Power. Aside from their interest in avian life (both the Scandinavian herring gull and the American whooping crane come in for a namecheck) Open Season welcomes the words "ventricles", "arrhythmia", "masonry" and "desalinate" into the vernacular of rock. To Get To Sleep helpfully offers a comparison of various insomnia cures, thus presumably marking the first appearance in song of Nytol and melatonin. As with the Smiths' references to black-and-white kitchen sink dramas and faded northern starlets, you are struck by the thrilling sense of being drawn into a world not defined by tired standard rock iconography.

Not just a marvellous album, Open Season comes with optimism attached. In recent years, record labels have apparently developed both a secret process for surgically depriving rock bands of their personality and a fiendish advance in studio technology by which generic Coldplay-style ballads can be produced at the flick of a switch. A depressingly number of bands have submitted to both in the search for chart success, but there has to be another way. Open Season shows there is. It's a triumphant lesson in sweeping gracefully towards the mainstream with your imagination and mystery intact, in becoming part of the scenery without jettisoning the desire to drape yourself in greenery.

4/5