Quicken The Heart — Maximo Park
Posted By Ben W. on May 30, 2009
Maximo Park always has been guilty of a nauseating earnestness. Singer/lyricist Paul Smith is a man who thinks “Tell me did those lonely hands rob your time, time, time; and when the signal divorced from the sign, sign, sign;” constitutes a hook. Presumably, it even means something to him, though Lord knows what.
No, those first two Maximo Park studio albums, along with the collection of B-sides sandwiched in between, were humorless affairs to be sure. But that’s OK. The songs therein were almost uniformly good and occasionally excellent. They were our favorite preposterously pretentious popsters whose melodic choruses on songs like “Graffiti,” “Our Velocity” and “Apply Some Pressure” won our hearts against our brain’s better judgement.
Intellectual emo, if you will.
Well, that winning balance has been thrown all out of whack here on the band’s third studio release. The preposterous pretension is still there. A glance at the song titles — “The Penultimate Clinch” and “Overland, West Of Suez,” thank you very much — is enough to illustrate this. What isn’t still there? The songs. Put plain, this album is dull. Very, very dull. It’s a 40-minute mass of tuneless gray noise, devoid of charm and dynamic.
Looking back, advance single “Wraithlike” was an ominous sign back in March. Its pedestrian guitar riff and thin melody weren’t the stuff of legendary comeback singles. It wasn’t awful, but it sure sounded like a B-side from the band’s 2005 output.
The sad news, now that we have the entire album, is it’s the best song on the record. By the time you’re knee deep into side two and trying to wade through soggy keyboard-drowned tracks like “Roller Disco Dreams” and “Tanned,” the idea of a decent 2005-vintage B-side sounds pretty damn good.
There’s nothing particularly complicated to figure out here. Smith’s vocals still sound great. Duncan Lloyd still has a fine way with a guitar melody (though he does play second fiddle this time out to an assortment of annoying keyboards and organs more often than he should). The band still rocks and moves with an almost machine-like tightness. The problem, plain and simple — the songs aren’t very good. Certainly not good enough to make up for the band’s inherent pretension.
To be fair, I should note that the opening trio of tracks isfairly enjoyable. But none would rightly qualify for a spot on the band’s first album. So how good can we really claim them to be?
This is not progress. Put a fork in another one of England’s mighty Class of ‘04.
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Oh dear oh dear.
Maximo Park are pretentious?well yes,they are a clever gang of musicians.
But you see,Ben W,they do have SOMETHING TO SAY.Whether the lyrics are obtuse or not,
you have to read between the lines of them,so to speak.The lyrics are cynical,angry,metaphorical and desperately different.
QTH is album which needs at least twenty listens before its meaning gels.
Think on that.