"A lot of white, middle class bands say, 'We're going to make a hip-hop record', but we're actually going to do it"
Since the success of their 2009 single Dominos, The Big Pink have become something of a household name on the indie scene, building up a reputation for wildly inconsistent live shows, embarking on a couple of US tours and winning the NME’s Best New Act award. Two and a half years on from their debut, A Brief History of Love, they return with Future This. While I’ve always thought of the band as paint-by-numbers indie, Robbie Furze’s (hastily retracted) claims of a potential hip-hop influence upon their sophomore record piqued my interest.
Now maybe I’m going mental, but Stay Gold sounds just like Dominos – in fact, the whole song, the chorus refrain in particular, is strongly reminiscent of their biggest hit to date: not exactly the great departure I expected. It’s a decent start, fairly catchy and sure to inspire vacant singalongs at their gigs. Hit the Ground (Superman) follows in this vein, but is less overt than Stay Gold; similarly, third track Give It Up uses the logic of ‘big chorus to cover up the cracks'. This track, the album's third, signifies a shift in production – while the beginning of the album feels like it’s trying to stay true to the band’s lo-fi roots, Give It Up signifies a step up in quality that carries through to the end of the record.
Following on from the upbeat The Palace, 1313 sounds like a tame These New Puritans track – the rhythmic beats and a disorientating mix of unusual sound effects combine with the chanting vocals to produce a solid track, until the nonsensical feedback-filled ending. The transition between synth-riddled Rubbernecking and Jump Music, a solid electro-pop track which begins with promise but is about two minutes too long, just doesn’t make sense – a fundamental problem with the album as a whole. Lose Your Mind and especially Future This display the album’s apparent hip-hop influence most clearly, especially in the excellent vocals of Future This, which leads well into closer 77 – the best track on the album. The track combines the album’s strongest lyrics with a catchy chorus and a stripped-down, subtle use of samples – its simplicity provides a welcome contrast with the clutter of the rest of the record.
Through Future This, the band have attempted to deviate from the path furrowed so deeply by their indie contemporaries over recent years, but have succeeded only in producing an album satiated with synths and samples which feels more like a weak recent effort from Foals or These New Puritans than the hip-hop-infused indie number I expected. They deserve credit for their bravery, attempting to innovate in an increasingly stagnant genre, but too many attempted styles, an annoying insistence on making the rhyme scheme in every chorus rhyme with "OH!" and a whole lot of clutter means they haven’t quite pulled it off this time.
6/10
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