Have The Vaccines really 'Come of Age'?

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?).