(Fiction)
Death and taxidermy: these used to be the certainties that defined White Lies. These provided at least two song titles, Death and Taxidermy, staking out White Lies' plot in pop's overcrowded churchyard. The west London trio released their debut, To Lose My Life , in January of 2009 (a quiet month), and promptly hit the No 1 spot, eventuallyselling nearly 900,000 copies worldwide. Whether it was any good or not largely depended on your attitude to stone seraphim.
White Lies' songs sulked grandiosely, coupling icy synths to Harry McVeigh's sonorous vocals, a formula previously trialled to lucrative returns by Editors. Unlike Editors, though, who beefed up the scrawny post-punk anomie of Joy Division, White Lies also threw back to bands like the Human League, Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears while glancing hopefully across to the Killers, masters of the stadium synth-pop takeover. Eighties addicts found much to savour in them; likewise, people on an Interpol jag. For all their melodic nous, though, White Lies often sounded like the barely-not-teenagers they were; fixating on the downside, inflating everything out of all proportion.
Lies – even the white ones – have a habit of growing. Having studied the blueprints of arenas, the trio released Ritual , their ramped-up second album, again in January, this time of 2011. Full of bluster, it consolidated the band as the sort of act that could play Wembley Arena.
Now Big TV arrives, not in January, but in August (just as quiet) and with a title markedly lacking in shadow play. Bring back the bats! you almost want to cry, as their widescreen sound threatens to eulogise the mammoth flatscreen.
There is a concept here, but it's not TV – or outer space, as the cover art and the Muse tour supports might suggest – but, rather, the progress of a young woman from some humble corner of Europe. She leaves her boyfriend for the big city and a father she has never known. Turns out, he's a radio phone-in host, and First Time Caller captures their reunion. A wider theme of Big TV is the imbalance of relationships, how one half always loves a little more than the other.
There aren't many pop concept albums about contemporary emigration, not least ones as catchy as this one. This time around White Lies are, if anything, more 80s than ever, but with fatter guitars, and Mother Tongue paying major homage to the chorus of Mad World by Tears For Fears. Get past that, though, and the song is (partly) a meditation on losing one's identity. There is something helplessly skewering about its vintage pop-rock chug.
How Big TV sits with you will probably depend on your attitude to Vienna by Ultravox. You cannot deny that these are massive melodies, now allied to aperçus that are a little more nuanced than likening the end of relationships to the end of life. The very hooky chorus to There Goes Our Love Again actually describes the kind of stormings out experienced by many long-term couples: "I didn't go far/ And I came home."
Sure, Tricky to Love still starts with churchy organs, and McVeigh still sounds like he has a reverb unit instead of a throat. But bassist Charles Cave, the band's chief lyricist, has lived a little. "My love/ Changes with the weather/ And my heart/ Red imitation leather," he offers, through McVeigh. I could be wrong, but I don't think Big TV mentions death once.
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by Kitty Empire via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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