An Album a Day 2012: You may have the body / But do you have the song? / Let's make this happen

From one album that went a bit under the radar, to one that was much lauded and applauded around – today it’s Metronomy’s “The English Riviera”.

This album is the true heir of David Bowie’s “Hunky Dory” with large lashings of Gary Numan, the Specials, the Cure and a bit of English folk thrown in. Whilst listening to it, it had this amazing quality that I could picture both the English seaside, in a pastoral way, and the suburban ennui of living in an English seaside town with not very much to do.

I think, as well, it’s an album that proves that guitar music (with help from keyboards and drums/beats) can very much be a dance album. In fact, the way instruments are used on this album is very innovative – I felt like there were exclamations of excitement going off in my head each time an instrumental started in a song. The single “The Look” contains such luscious sounding keyboards, complimented with beats, that make you want to boogie. “Trouble” has multiple instrumental parts, sparkling guitars and an innovative use of voice sounding more like a computer (through a vocoder or voice distorter). This song, most noticeably, allows the instruments to speak as if they were the vocals – each with equal measure of importance.

“We Broke Free” has a reigned-in feeling to it, as everything is tense and just on the edge. I felt like it would be a great song to accompany a scene from “Brighton Rock”, riding around town on vespas. The blasts of crazy sounding guitars against moments of quiet were also really interesting.

“Everything Goes My Way” sounds like Metronomy’s answer to the question ‘What is English salsa?’. It’s nice to hear a proper duet toward the end of the song where the female vocalist’s plight of returning love is reinforced by an answer from the male singer:

“But now you've got me back,
You know I'll never up and run
Yeah I'll stay in here, I stay right here”

You do get a slight feeling of insecurity, however, that all is not quite right because at the end of the song there is so much repetition “Love, I’m in love again”, as if to reinforce as well as impress upon the listener and the vocalist that she really is in love. Ok, we get it. “She Wants” also uses a lot of repetition, but this time it’s about being sleep-deprived “The hours come”. This song reminded me of the gloom of The Specials’ “Ghost Town”, and it’s a nice amplification: the gloom of the song against the gloom of sleeplessness.

“The Bay” and “Loving Arm” are synth heroes, straight out of the Gary Numan way of doing things. “The Bay” is probably the best dance track, awesome keyboard and bass combination and the guitar proving that guitars can dance too. It’s an amusing song lyrically as the bay is described as being all the places it’s not (Paris, London, Berlin, Hong Kong and Tokyo). Despite this, it’s still a place to go back to - I guess there's no place like home. “Loving Arm” uses even more amazing keyboards/synths/even a moog? to sound something akin to the theme tune of Doctor Who. It also contains the spectacular lyric “I’m flying down the coast to love”.

“Corinne” (nodding vigorously to early Cure) and “Some Written” (genuflecting toward Rick Wakemen/Revolver era Beatles) have amazing keyboard solos – in fact, in the latter song the keyboards almost sound like a ukulele. “Corinne” is the lovelorn song “Oh Corinne I’ve got a pain in my heart for you” while “Some Written” tells the tragedy of getting someone’s number, but missing off one important digit.

It’s the perfect album length (like Laura Marling’s) without too much bulge (although the last two tracks almost feel like a coda rather than adding anything significant) but on the whole the album invigorates the English tradition of dancing to guitar music (with large lashings of keyboards that sound like everything except keyboards!). An ace album.