FEATURE:
Second Spin
Metronomy - Love Letters
___________
NOT that this album is necessarily underrated…
but I feel it does not get the credit and love that other Metronomy albums have. Love Letters, the band’s fifth studio album, followed The English Riviera of 2011. Their 2014 album is full of brilliant material. I especially love the title track and its ABBA sound. Elsewhere, I'm Aquarius, Reservoir and Month of Sundays provide natural and instant highlights. The band’s latest album, Small World, arrived last month. Looking back at Metronomy’s discography, and I feel all of their albums deserve slightly better than the overall critical reception. Most of the feedback is positive, though I feel albums like Love Letters are not played enough. I have heard the title track on the radio a bit, yet there is so much more on the album to enjoy. Produced by the band’s lead Joe Mount and recorded at London’s Toe Rag, Love Letters is a brilliant album that is worth a revisit. With great performances from the entire band (Olugbenga Adelekan – bass, Anna Prior – drums, Michael Lovett – keyboards and Oscar Cash – piano, keyboards; special props to Anna Prior) and some of Metronomy’s best material, Love Letters is worthy of some fresh evaluation. Away from some more mixed reviews (the sort of three-star range), there was positivity and appreciation for a great album from a band who are among our very best. There was a feeling from the band (Mount especially) that Love Letters could be the last; maybe a couple of other albums. As it stands, Metronomy have released three more albums and show no signs of slowing!
I will get to a couple of great reviews for the excellent Love Letters. Before that, I want to reference an interview from The Guardian in 2014. It is interesting hearing Joe Mount (he was interviewed solo) feel Love Letters lacked commercial appeal. The title track especially is very accessible and has a commercial edge, without it being mainstream or straying from the band’s formula and distinct sound:
“People think Love Letters is going to be a big hit but Mount seems blithely indifferent to its commercial chances. On the one hand, he notes, Metronomy played some US arena gigs supporting Coldplay, which came as something of a surprise, given that Mount had publicly expressed his dislike of Coldplay's music ("I think we have to appreciate that Chris and the boys, they've got bigger fish to fry than trawling through our old interviews," he says now), but nevertheless gave Mount an opportunity to watch one of the biggest bands in the world up close.
He thinks there are "moments in the new songs that could accidentally turn into rousing stadium moments, although that was the furthest thing from my mind when I was doing them". On the other, as he points out, "if there had been traditonal music industry pressure to make a big followup, I would have gone into a big studio with [U2 producer] Flood and spent a lot of money recording a very polished kind of radio album, and I did the exact opposite of that."
Instead, Metronomy decamped to East London's famously retro Toe Rag Studios, famed for turning out garage rock records – not least the White Stripes' Elephant – and whose owner, Liam Watson, seemed initially nonplussed by Mount turning up with synthesisers and drum machines: "He was taking us around sort of saying: 'You're going to hate it here.'"
There are plenty of fantastic songs on Love Letters, but it doesn't sound much like The English Riviera's attempt to imagine a genre of music that had grown up in isolation in Torquay – which turned out to be a very English take on Steely Dan's ultra-slick brand of rock – instead offering something influenced by psychedelia and Sly Stone's experiments with a primitive drum machine. But then again, Metronomy's fans have presumably got used to Mount taking sudden left turns: you could never accuse him of having stuck doggedly to a musical blueprint.
He says he always thinks every Metronomy album is going to be their last. "I imagine that one day I will stop doing this and be a producer, I can see that. But with every record, I'm always surprised by the reality of the situation. With every record, I'm so surprised by how viable being a musician is, that I'm like, well, I can put off this idea that I have to become a producer."
But then, he says, Metronomy's recent success has caused him to revise that kind of thinking. "Yeah, I now think I've probably got two more albums left in me," he smiles. "We'll see”.
I want to move on to some love for Love Letters. To show that it is an album that got its share of acclaim. Almost eight years to the day it was released (10th March), it is an album that I am still listening to and being amazed by. This is what AllMusic noted in their review of Metronomy’s Love Letters:
“Given the critical and commercial success of The English Riviera, Metronomy could have easily spent another album or two expanding on its polished, erudite pop. However, they're too mercurial a band to do the obvious thing. On Love Letters, they abandon their previous album's sleek precision for fuzzy analog charm. Metronomy recorded the album at London's Toe Rag studio, a fixture of British indie rock, and Joe Mount and company imbue these songs with the room's warmth and intimacy. Musically and emotionally, Love Letters is rawer than what came before it, trading breezy synth pop for insistent psych-rock and soul influences. The main carryover from The English Riviera is the increasing sophistication, and melancholy, in Mount's songwriting. Previously, his best songs were playful and ever so slightly emotional; on Love Letters, he flips this formula, penning songs filled with lost love, regrets, and just enough wit to sting. The album opens with three striking portraits of heartbreak: "The Upsetter" equals its distance with its urgency, capping it all with an achingly gorgeous guitar solo.
"I'm Aquarius" traces the fallout of a star-crossed relationship impressionistically, with girl group-style "shoop doop"s almost overpowering Mount's reasons why it didn't work ("you're a novice/I'm a tourist"), as if memories of his ex crowd out everything else. "Monstrous" turns Metronomy's signature jaunty keyboards Baroque and paranoid, with a doomy organ that closes in when Mount sings "hold on tight to everything you love," and a counterpoint that captures the way loneliness and heartbreak circle each other. These songs set the stage perfectly for the desperate romance of "Love Letters" itself, which updates punchy, late-'60s Motown drama so well that it's easy to imagine the Four Tops singing it. Here and on "Month of Sundays"'s acid rock vistas, Metronomy's nods to the past feel more like footnotes than following too closely in anyone's footsteps. However, they sound more comfortable with their own quirks as well, giving more muscle to "Boy Racers" than their previous instrumentals, and more depth to "Reservoir," which is the closest it gets to a typical Metronomy song (if there is such a thing anymore). Confessional and insular, Love Letters is the work of a band willing to take pop success on their own terms and reveal a different -- but just as appealing -- side of their artistry in the process”.
I will round up very soon. NME’s review is interesting. I hadn’t noticed before but, when we think of an album and its sound, how many mention the studios!? Toe Rag is a studio that deals with older, more basic equipment – so music recorded there has a more stripped sound. The analogue sound might work for a lot of bands, but was everyone prepared for this from Metronomy? NME explain how a more lived-in sound pays off the more you listen:
“When last we saw Metronomy, they were strolling rakishly into the golden light of a Torbay sunset, a Mercury nomination in their back pocket and sales of their third album racking up like rows of cherries on a one-armed-bandit slot machine. The success of 'The English Riviera' could hardly have happened to a more deserving band, but anyone expecting ‘Love Letters’ to pick up where its predecessor’s tongue-in-cheek vision of seaside glamour left off will be disappointed. "Back out on the riviera, it gets so cold at night", yelps a forlorn-sounding Joseph Mount on opener 'The Upsetter', a song that drops references to early-’90s cultural touchstones like Tasmin Archer, Whitney Houston and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but whose droning atmosphere of dislocation and anxiety has more in common with David Bowie’s 'Space Oddity' than Archer’s 'Sleeping Satellite'. By the time the ghostly 'Never Wanted' brings things to a close, 40 too-brief minutes later, it's impossible not to picture tumbleweed blowing down a derelict promenade, past stacks of weather-beaten deck chairs, shuttered-up bars and empty arcades. The inference is clear: welcome to the off-season.
Where a more craven artist might have sought to cash in on a sleeper hit like 'The English Riviera' with a big, populist follow-up, Mount has returned with a small, unashamedly personal one, made with an auteur’s ear for detail and disregard for expectation. It's an album about yearning to return to the things you've been dragged away from, be they the landmarks of your childhood (the quaint casiotone melancholy of 'Reservoir') or your children themselves ("Honestly, it's all I'm thinking of", sings a distracted Mount of his baby son on 'Monstrous'). You'll find nothing here as immediate or accessible as 'The Bay', and even among those who were predisposed to love them, the album's first two singles have polarised, not galvanised, opinion: the velvety future-doo-wop of 'I'm Aquarius' served as a curiously moody and minor-key introduction, while the title track came screeching in from the other extreme, as ostentatious and off-puttingly exuberant as a troupe of Redcoats jazz-handing their way through a Wings medley.
This contrarian impulse ultimately makes things more interesting, but Mount's decision to record at Toe Rag – the all-analogue Hackney studio made famous by The White Stripes and Billy Childish – imbues the songs with an archaic, lived-in feel that takes some getting used to, and you'd be forgiven for being underwhelmed by your first listen. Bear with it, however, and that feeling will turn to pleasant surprise. 'Monstrous' and 'Month of Sundays' both recall the airy baroque-pop of Arthur Lee and Love (though the latter ends up sounding like one of Yoko Ono's more angular, New Wave-y efforts), and with the exception of 'Boy Racers' – a lightweight instrumental that doesn't quite feel properly realised – every song, no matter how slight it may initially seem, serves an aesthetic purpose in the grander scheme of things.
In recent interviews, Mount has professed a certain dread about one day reaching the Wembley-conquering enormity of his old tourmates Coldplay, which – even when you take Metronomy’s growing popularity into account – sounds comically premature. ‘Love Letters’ should assuage that angst. While not a ‘difficult’ album per se, it is certainly an obdurate and insular one, whose charms are revealed coyly and across repeat listens. ‘The English Riviera’ was for the tourists; this one needs to be lived in, not just visit”.
I like the fact that Love Letters features ten tracks that run between three and five minutes. It is quite an economic album in terms of the number of songs, through the band allow the songs plenty of time and room. Recording at Toe Rag works in Love Letters’ favour. It creates this nuance that benefits repeated listens. Like love letters themselves, maybe the album does sound oldskool or lacks a modern edge. The production and sound of the album is fantastic. The title track especially sparkles and has such a sleek and glossy sound, though it also has a bit of a live feel to it. With no real weak tracks to be found, Metronomy’s Love Letters is worthy of…
A passionate spin.