Album Review : Everything Everything - Man Alive

Natalie: I've said it before and I'll say it again: the thing that sets Everything Everything apart from the crowd is the fizziness of their songs. They're a truly great band, and they've got this stride to them - they're not afraid of how untouchable they are. It's like they're shouting "bollocks to making music that sounds unusual, and we're certainly not going to patronise you - we know you're all clever enough to love us as much as we love our music"; they're not even acknowledging that their contrasts, ambitions and flinches are unusual. I feel guilty for even mentioning that what they're doing is so abnormally excellent but it's got to be said - there's nothing vaguely common or garden going on here...

Greg: There're about three albums worth of ideas condensed down to 12 songs on Man Alive, which is innovative in itself at the moment seeing as a lot of bands are happy to settle on one good idea and plug away at it across a whole record, particularly on a debut. An abundance of ideas does not necessarily make a great record though - what's great is that, most of the time, the band manage to fuse them together in ways that shouldn't work, or at least shouldn't have been attempted. Though it's been around for what feels like years, 'Photoshop Handsome' is a case in point - pure sonic bravery that they've carried over to the record as a whole.

Natalie: It's that it's so familiar in spite of being so foreign, isn't it. You can trace those spitfire rhymes back to hip-hop - I could go on but it doesn't matter who they love and what bits of x or y person's craft they've lifted into this fizz. It's beyond human how many ideas are there, and that they're by no means buried underneath the lead vocal, the hook - it's all right there, unabashed and unafraid. Man Alive sounds so big, brash and brightly coloured, and their name's the aptest thing ever. I bow to them.

Greg: I've listened to Man Alive an embarassing number of times, and I still don't know what half of these songs are about. 'My Kz, Ur BF' is like watching a Coronation Street omnibus on fast forward, with its explosions and romantic entanglements flying by at breakneck speed. At other times, it's like listening to a hip-hop record - you won't catch all the great lines first, second, third time around, but they're waiting for you.

Natalie: They're squealing to be understood. Squealing "MEEEE, skip back five seconds and listen to meeee!", jostling against each other. They're making the effort, and some. But if the whole thing were at such breakneck speed, it'd be grating...

Greg: Too right - on its own 'Two For Nero' feels like a failed experiment, but it's perfect between 'Photoshop Handsome' and 'Suffragette Suffragette'. 'Tin (The Manhole)' serves a similar purpose later on - it's easily their prettiest moment and it's quietly become one of my favourite songs on the second side.

Natalie: It's like the seeing-them-live dilemma; after two visits, I now know that it's impossible for them to sound like they're running at the same pace as their songs. Genuinely impossible. It's too much. But to let that be a dampener isn't akin to admiting defeat, oh no - it simply provides a counterpoint. It depends on your threshold for treasured bands meeting studio-quality live (because that's what Average Joe ponders upon entering the doors of an O2 Academy, Barfly etc) as to whether that tempers just how incredible a band they are. For me, there is absolutely no way that it does. Though that said, I feel that 'Qwerty Finger' lets the side down - I find its verses too plodding, the builds comparatively undramatic (hey, this is relative) and the choruses that percentage point too hysterical. The same could be said of its qualities, all told...

Greg: I think it could prove to be a deal breaker for the many people coming to this album still waiting to be convinced. I'd tell them to hang in there though, as that track precedes a quite astonishing four-song run. I can see some lazy reviews making superficial comparisons with Queen and/or prog rock, and it's here that you might be tempted to admit that they have a point - they do the frantic pace and abrupt changes better on other songs. It's not without its charms though - Jonathan's yelps and the tumbling guitars and synths suggest they aren't taking themselves completely seriously..

Natalie: And let's go back to the lyrics to indulge Jonathan Everything in a bit more revelry. Fig. 1, 'Photoshop Handsome': "I have skin like a waxen peel/ and a face that I can never feel". And heck, the track's title alone... this is proper contemporary genius, innit.

Greg: Or "My teeth dazzle like an igloo wall/ I inhabit, I inhabit y'all". Or every other line to be honest.

Natalie: But what the heck does it all mean? Imagine someone chatting you up with these lines? It'd probably work on me. Imagine someone looking at you "like "woah!"" (as on 'My Kz, Ur BF'). They take the whole quick-syllable thing from Destiny's Child et al to a new level. And the extraordinary falsetto is like Beyonce in Dreamgirls-mode or even Prince fronting The Futureheads, according to me after a few too many G&Ts - quite apt, even though I cringed at myself at the time.

Greg: I like that description. This record does remind me a bit of being excited by the debuts by Maxïmo Park and The Futureheads in 2004 - Man Alive has a similarly frantic eagerness about it. More recently there was Wild Beasts' first record, which bears similarities in that Everything Everything are so unique that their sound is yet to fully develop - don't bet against a Two Dancers-standard follow up. They look to a broader set of influences though, for sure - Destiny's Child, definitely. Missy Elliot too, OutKast. You could even make a case for nods towards artists as far removed as The Pet Shop Boys and Brian Eno.

Natalie: The desperation in it all and the feeling that they're on borrowed time in the listener's ears, it's absolutely a parallel. There's such an amazing contrast between Everything Everything's influences and those being referenced by "the hype bands" (ack) - they make Yuck's Archers of Loaf impressions seem uneducated and lazy, and some-time tour pals Darwin Deez (at a push, a Mr. Motivator fanboy) and Hurts (Elemental-era Tears For Fears? Getting desperate now...) look less and less oxygen-worthy. It's the effort thing again, and the breadth of knowledge at play.

And Man Alive is such great fodder for the crap writer. The one that listens to 30 seconds of a song, and immediately files their 300 words - Everything Everything are masters of the music-hack mousetrap.  On a listen to a snippet, they'll find veritable festivals of similes spewing from their synapses, begging to be snapped up. "Like a non Pop Idol Liberty X if they'd had a course in songwriting from an LSD-high The Young Knives". You get the picture.

But I must briefly halt for Man Alive does have its faults, which arise from how Everything Everything come crashing and stumbling on at such velocity that the production sometimes finds itself playing catch-up. And there's some filler too, which is frustrating - and leads to the thought process that it may've worked better as an EP. But then would it've sounded too saturated?

Greg: I think the moments of filler help pace the album - I think they're still developing new dimensions and angles to their sound. The speed with which they've come on is frightening - I saw them live on three occasions between early 2009 and early 2010 and they'd jumped forward each time.

Natalie: We're absolutely agreed on their progress - I saw them at Stag & Dagger in 2009 and they didn't blow me away. But maybe that's because without having the recorded songs to compare the performances with, it was just too much? I have a slight fear that this is what happened in the studio; the producer didn't quite know what to do with them. I just want the best for this band, as if I have a personal interest; all criticisms here are of course to be borne in mind of just how stonking this debut is. It's an uber-stonking record.

Take the astounding 'Schoolin'', for example. It's more lithe than any of the other arrangements on Man Alive. The build ups are SLICK, and those sucked-up harmonies pinpointing the main line in the chorus and the introduction of the funky guitars are unimaginably brilliant. The space-age keyboard whizzing, the whirling feelings and the lyrics: “I’ve got myself a fire hydrant with more tyrant and watery blast than all of my past". They are amazing. It is just brilliant.

Greg: True. If anyone's still wondering what Man Alive sounds like, they should listen to 'Schoolin'' - it's the most complete summation of Everything Everything's sound and hints at the twist and turns they take on the rest of the album.

Natalie: And 'Final Form', which is a huge pop song just like the rest. I'm going to be That Lazy Journalist here, and say it's like the moment 'Danger Of The Water' entered my ears on The Futureheads' debut - it adds a whole new level, maaan. There are no similarities in in any other way, it's just a parallel cherry on top.

Greg: I think 'Final Form' is my favourite. It's subtler than the others and easy to miss on a first side where the songs, well... aren't subtle. I think it's the woozy synths on the chorus that make it - the drums are blinding too. Jonathan's range is more obvious on other songs, definitely, but he sounds positively soulful here. It suggests that Everything Everything could build in completely new directions without losing any of their eccentricities.

See this: "Princess Diana abbatoir sea anenome fox fire hydrant A4 paper taking over the guillotine the taj mahal o zone layer faraday cage sitting on fences pedigree chum engines burning polythene bags keyboard bloody hands clapping everything everything". Yep.

WILL YOU ALL GO AND BUY IT NOW, PLEASE?