Album Review: Collapse Under The Empire - Find A Place To Be Safe

This is the latest album from the young Hamburg team who play their post-rock with a pinch of electronica.

Opening track Captured Moments is a promising start with its bleary-eyed guitars that explode into white noise, layered by fuzzy underwater strings and piano. Matthew Jason and Chris Burda then continue this winning streak with former single Crawling and the vibrant, dramatic title track.

But further in, the album collapses under its own weight. Tranquillity is an uncomfortable mix of hair-metal guitar and rigid, sequenced backing tracks. Lacking the ragged rock rush of Mogwai, much of this album has the synthetic sound of an overproduced bedroom recording. Angle Of Incidence and the unfortunately titled A Smell Of Boiled Greens drift in to the sterile realms of Muzak, whilst Far To The Past could be an Editors’ instrumental outtake.

Intelligence and Take A Shot On Me do however give the album a rousing end, almost returning to the impressive form of the opening tracks. But ultimately, despite the flashes of brilliance, this duo doesn’t do enough with this well-trodden genre to warrant repeated listens.

Album Review: The Big Pink - A Brief History of Love

Album opener Crystal Visions sets the scene straight away, beginning with psychedelic, twinkling-in-the-sunset lead guitar that would sit happily anywhere on The Verve’s Storm in Heaven. Then Milo Cordell pushes the red button and the track suddenly lurches into a wide-eyed, fringe-flicking groove, MBV guitars haemorrhage in the background whilst Robbie Furze’s chanting channels the cool detachment of Jason Pierce. The punctual Too Young To Love clatters in immediately afterwards, with a beat which sounds a lot like the one from Boards Of Canada’s Kid For Today, but at ten times the speed with added JAMC squall and Happy Mondays swagger. The slightly less exhilarating but just as infectious recent single Dominos is up next, which brings to mind early Secret Machines.

On the title track the band deploy some breathy female vocals; Furze and Joanne Robertson exchange mantras during this gorgeous, feedback-drenched lullaby. Imagine Ian McCulloch and Hope Sandoval trying to hypnotise each other in the front row of a Telescopes concert. Frisk and Count Backwards From Ten showcase The Big Pink’s skilful way in which they fuse fuzzed-up guitars and pulsing electronica, keeping the music organic enough to avoid sounding clinical, and the latter track’s leering drone closes the album.

The Big Pink are a band who wear their influences clearly on their sleeves, so much so that this album could have been called A Brief History of British Indie Circa 1990. As with a lot of music of this ilk, the lyrics are murky and at times too self conscious. This is something typical of the shoe-gaze genre though, a scene where an other-worldly aloofness is almost expected. Many of the words murmured on this album feel functional, simply there to fit the melody. But, keeping things simple but effective seems to be The Big Pink’s general rule of thumb. One could argue that The Big Pink’s influences are obvious, but as the talented duo have cherry-picked only fantastic influences to throw into the mix, they’ve produced album that is up there with the best that their direct musical ancestors have to offer. A Brief History of Love is a more than welcome addition to the ongoing dream-pop revival.