Typically pooled with adjectives like ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘fragmented’, when Manchester quartet Everything Everything burst onto the indie music landscape in 2010, their hectic music seemed to live up to their name.
Drawing a stylistic lineage from Radiohead to Bloc Party to Foals, their music showcased their smarts as much as it in turn demanded them from the listener.
Their debut album, Man Alive, was bursting with sonic ingenuity and marked with Jonathan Higgs’ distinctive singing and vocals – all abstract lyrics delivered at an alarming rate, in tongue-tying vowels and a curled falsetto. Its hyperactivity sounded like the perfect post-modern soundtrack for the internet generation.
Although its full-length successor, Arc, begins with the busy, rhythmically barrelling ‘Cough Cough’, it in fact eventually becomes a more restrained and understated affair, but one no less lacking in enviable ideas and unique songwriting.
‘Kemosabe’ and ‘Armourland’ have verses that trill with cut-up vocals and clipped shapes, along with drummer Michael Spearman’s consistently essential grooves, but their bright, soaring choruses (“I wanna take you home” coos the latter) are signs that it’s not all aggravated attention spans for album number two.
‘Duet’ is backed by a string quartet that rises to a stunning climax, a similar crescendo marking the synth-laden beauty of penultimate track ‘The Peaks’; as Higgs achingly laments “I’ve seen more villages burn than animals born/ I’ve seen more towers come down than children grow up.”
It’s one of many stirring moments on an album that has some genuine pathos and poignancy mixed in amongst songs that critique the high-speed disjointedness of modern existence, even as their genre-bending music is a product of it worth celebrating.
Moments of restraint are cleverly leavened with surging moments of attack. ‘Torso Of The Week’ begins with an RnB drum strut, but its circling guitars engage a dissonant, wailing chorus, while ‘Feet For Hands’ frantic, minor key acoustic strumming and thudding drum beat invert into a lilting major key in sections.
Set to be one of the year’s most refreshing and inventive listens, Arc proves that Everything Everything are capable of mellowing as well as maddening, and cleverly know when to engage which.
