Now,
I know what you’re thinking. Going from discussing something as deep and
philosophical as what The xx represent and don’t represent (see my last blog
post) to a band as one-dimensional as The Vaccines (see, well, this blog post)
is a bit of a dumbing down in all senses of the word, but I’ll have you know
the depths to which my musical discussions have plummeted are not as low as you
might think. I’ll admit, I – along with many, many others, I imagine – wasn’t
expecting this record to be a life-changer. One of the reasons why I wasn’t
such a fan of their first, What Did You
Expect from The Vaccines?, was because it was so far away from being a
life-changer (but maybe that’s me being overly pretentious and expecting
something from a band that they were never going to give?). I just found there
were absolutely no layers to the album (figurative, not literal – unless, of
course, your What Did You Expect from The
Vaccines? was an onion) and had a very short expiry date as a result (how
this onion analogy has continued, I have no idea) – there were the vocals, the
guitars and the drums and nothing
else. And if the two singles taken from Come
of Age so far were anything to go by (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_3eEPpmKwE
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFUKrsDDChE), along with the
band’s new American rock’n’roll image (think denim waistcoats, leather boots
and shoulder length hair), it would appear that they adopted the attitude of
‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ (and ‘broken’ it certainly wasn’t – within
seemingly no time at all they were playing to God knows how many thousands
whilst supporting Arcade Fire in Hyde Park and had their debut at No.4 in the
charts). But we all know what I think about bands barely changing their sound
between albums (see my previous blog post-come-rant about The xx’s ‘new’ LP if
not), with my frustration/opinion being only heightened were bands as simple as
The Vaccines to do so (at least The xx have their rather distinct sound going
for them; The Vaccines sound exactly like who knows how many stereotypically
indie bands out there).
One
might expect the lyrics on the new album to be the game-changer, then, the element
that prevents the blog post being more ‘rant’ than ‘review’. Maybe lead singer
Justin Young went all Rou Reynolds (of Enter Shikari) on us and started ranting
and (quite literally, in Rou’s case) raving about politics and the suchlike?
But then given that the band’s image went from decidedly English to decidedly
American in between album No.1 and album No.2, maybe not the politics idea so
much. Accordingly, a good deal of Come of
Age’s lyrics could well fit on the band’s knowingly no frills debut; the
chorus of If You Wanna from their
first (“But if you wanna come back it’s alright, it’s alright! It’s alright if
you wanna come back!”) is almost as revolutionary as that of Bad Mood off their second (“I’m in a
bad, bad mood, a bad, bad mood!”). The band being as creative and inspirational
with their lyrics as they are with their song titles, then (sarcasm has always
been hard to convey online).
But
as alluded to earlier, I can appreciate that it isn’t fair to judge a band’s
work in general on how life changing their lyrics are when the band in question
never set out either to be life changing, nor produce lyrics that would be
remembered for years to come. The Vaccines know that they amount to not a whole
lot more than a straight up rock’n’roll band and consequently don’t pretend to
be anything else, and for this they have my respect.
What,
then, is preventing this review from being a mere declaration of frustration?
Those who graduated from spy school will have spied with their little eye that,
apart from one brief occasion, there’s an element fairly instrumental (cringe) to most albums I am yet to discuss – the
actual music. It is this that
prompted me to write this review. (Notice I use the word ‘review’: as mentioned
in my last blog post, I feel that when it comes to reviewing albums, it’s best
to adopt the attitude ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say
anything at all’ – this then prevents the possibility of one slating an album
for the simple reason that it isn’t to their taste, which I feel amounts more
to a ‘rant’ than it does a ‘review’ and is massively unfair.) A couple months
back, I was lucky enough to gain work experience with The Fly (@THEFLYMAGAZINE), a music magazine you might have heard of
(it’s the one you can get for free from HMV). Amongst other things, one of my
tasks was to transcribe an interview one of the staff writers (@harrietgibsone)
had just conducted with Justin Young, the lead singer of The Vaccines. He said
a bunch of things you’d expect a lead singer with a new album coming out soon
to say (‘we’ve really grown as a band’, ‘this is our best album yet’, you know
the stuff), but then he also said a few things which took me slightly by
surprise. Firstly, he claimed he’d grown his hair down to his shoulders and now
wore double-denim – Harriet was as shocked as I was, The Vaccines were meant to
be renowned for their sense of style? But that’s beside the point – this is
meant to be an album review, after all. More importantly, Mr. Young remarked at
just how good the members of his band were at playing their respective
instruments. Now, you’re probably a little taken aback by my saying this was a
bit of a surprise – I’ll admit saying so is a little harsh, and I completely
understand that given that I don’t have a musical bone in my body I’m not
really in a position to make such brash remarks – but I’ll explain. At the time
of the interview, all I’d heard from The Vaccines was their first album and (I
think) the lead single off their yet-to-be-released second album, No Hope, most of which was
simple-as-can-be indie, occasionally verging on a bit punk rocky (take the
intro and verses of If You Wanna (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQKjI6395iU), for example).
In my opinion, and I appreciate that my music taste might well have an
influence here, creating music like this doesn’t require skill as such – as
mentioned, I’ve not a single musical bone in my body and yet I feel I’d get far
closer to banging the drums and strumming the chords like The Vaccines do on
their first than I would, say, finger plucking with real intensity or creating
an immersive atmosphere (i.e. creative methods that, in my opinion, require
real artistic skill). Hence my surprise when Justin spoke of the skill of his
remaining band members. But on the occasional song on Come of Age, The Vaccines’ choose not to bang their drums and thrash their guitars as if they were an
indie band trying to be a punk rock band and it is this that makes all the
difference for me – it is that that shows that they are not a one trick pony, with their only ‘trick’ being able to bang
their drums and thrash their guitars as hard as possible (slight exaggeration).
I Always Knew shows that the band are
aware a chorus can still be catchy even if it doesn’t go at a rate of knots; All
In Vain shows that the band acknowledge that mellow can still be cool; Aftershave Ocean features the highly
difficult but much appreciated tight fingerwork previously mentioned; heck, Lonely World is bordering on a ballad
(but I guess this can only be so much of a surprise with a title as emo as
that)! It is these realisations and advancements on the band’s behalf that show
they have undertaken the all important evolution that was so needed since their
first album, and it is these realisations and advancements on the band’s behalf
that turns them into the band they initially promised to be way back when. You
could even say that the band have Come of
Age (because who doesn’t end their review with a cringeworthy cliché these
days?).
