Do You Like Rock Music?

We can only wonder how patterns of economic migration have affected life in Morrissey’s current home in Rome. If the singer still lived a few doors down from Alan Bennett in Camden, would he have been so swift to paint a dramatic picture of a Britain whose “floodgates had opened”? Had he ever tried to get a decent, polite, honest plumber or electrician in the days when indigenous Brits had a monopoly on those professions, he might have been inclined to don the rubber ring he once sang about and lever those floodgates open himself.

We’ve lost Morrissey, but we can hear his fans adapting to a world with which he may no longer want to engage. “Welcome in,” sing British Sea Power in Waving Flags, “From across the Vistula/You’ve come so very far . . . Oh, welcome in/Across the Carpathians.” The ethereal positivism of the Brighton-based northerners’ new single might even give them that hitherto elusive Top Ten single.

Then again, you suspect that BSP have long given up making that sort of prediction. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s going well,” sings the frontman Yan on Canvey Island. This being BSP – a band with a fascination for radio masts, maritime history, stuffed animals and fell-walking – it’s a song about the 1953 North Sea flood on the island that claimed 48 lives. Nevertheless the nagging point remains that Do You Like Rock Music? is the surging, urgent sound of a band going for broke. In 2005 Open Season didn’t get the predicted Mercury nomination, which must have made it doubly frustrating when Arcade Fire rode to major success with a sonic and sartorial blueprint that BSP had mapped out years previously.

Perhaps that means that in a post-Arcade Fire world, the steamrollering indie rock of A Trip Out or the ecclesiastical spook-dirge of We Close Our Eyes might have a new audience waiting for them. It would be heartening to think so, not least because we’d have to wait a long time before Arcade Fire divined a soaring indie rock battle cry from the “Ea-sy! Ea-sy! Ea-sy!” chant made famous by the English wrestling giant Big Daddy. And yet without an ounce of irony, No Lucifer hurtles from that point like a Sherman tank.

Do You Like Rock Music? is a record rooted in a love of a 1980s indie-rock aesthetic. Had they been on a major label, they would no doubt have been directed to Jacknife Lee’s studio – like Editors and Snow Patrol – and encouraged to defer as he sprinkled his radio-friendly stardust all over it.

Instead, they’ve allowed the producer Graham Sutton to help them make a far more interesting record than that. Which means that over here it might not propel them to the venues that would best serve the rain-lashed immensity of their sound. But in America Do You Like Rock Music? has the makings of a surprise smash.

4/5

Author: Pete Paphides                                                                                                                                                                         Source: The Times