British Sea Power - Zeus EP
- Written by Joe Bates
Zeus, the new EP by British Sea Power, occasionally seems to scream out to not be taken seriously. It opens with the line 'Rick Stein, pleased to meet you', and goes on from there, taking in autotuned glam rock, Mark E. Smith impressions, and a hidden track sung from the perspective of an alien. Their sense of humour has been a strong plus point for the band since their debut, The Decline of British Sea Power. But on this EP it seems more like a defence mechanism, a request not to judge too harshly because none of what they do is meant in earnest. Well, they certainly need some sort of defense mechanism; this EP is bloody awful.
Similar to Do You Like Rock Music?, their previous album (not counting soundtrack album Man Of Aran), British Sea Power's quirks have began running the show. As a response to the perceived sophmore slump of Open Season, they tried to blast away the cobwebs with loud, reverb-soaked guitars and self-consciously epic, self-consciously daft songs. A very mixed-bag of an album, it dispensed with a lot of the craft of the previous two, and we were left with a band who we were sure sounded great live but had diminished on record. On Zeus, they reign themselves in even less. The title track sounds like a more unhinged version of their ‘Lights Out for Darker Skies’, all tremelo-picked guitars and frantic, jolting movement from one section to another. Its lyrics, vaguely inspired in their ridiculousness, and the pounding rhythm provide enough enjoyment that its 7 minutes pass nicely enough, but really, it's nothing that they haven't offered before.
Despite that, it's by far the best track on this collection. The other tracks are either featureless pieces of dull ambience or simply terrible songs. In the latter section, 'Can We Do It', the aformentioned impression of the Fall, is a wretched exercise in apathetic playing and lazy songwriting. 'kW-h', the autotuned Super Furry Animals/glam rock pastiche, is so grating it could be intended as a musical equivalent to the torture-porn film genre – you're not meant to enjoy it, you're just testing the limits of what you can sit through. The fact that these songs have their tongues very firmly in their cheeks (if songs have tongues and cheeks, that is), doesn't make any difference to how obnoxious they are to listen to.
Not every track is as painful as those two, but that doesn't mean the others are any good. 'Cleaning Out the Rooms' and 'Retreat' fall in the same category as most of the second half of Do You Like Rock Music?, songs that aspire to prettiness but just evaporate into nothing, structures not interesting enough to make pretty songs and textures not interesting enough to make pretty soundscapes. 'Bear' seems to stand out in the mess, only for the fact that it seems to have had some thought put into it. However, there's little to recommend it, and it is somewhat alarming that even when British Sea Power are trying they are unable to create a song that qualifies as anything more than pleasant.
This is just an EP, despite being album-length and actually feeling like it is several hours long. The album in 2011 will no doubt be more focussed and less scattershot. But it is worrying how British Sea Power seem to categorise themselves at the moment. Their humour and idiosyncracies are now at the forefront, and there has been a steady downward momentum since their first album. Are this band still capable of writing a song like 'Fear of Drowning' or 'Victorian Ice', or have they gone too far down the bombastic irony route? Hopefully this EP will mean nothing in the grand narrative of their recording career, but there is a chance it is the sound of a band pigeon-holing themselves too far, and creating music that is far below their potential.