Everything Everything – ‘MY KZ UR BF’
So, we all know Hurts are reissuing ‘Wonderful Life’, right? This is largely because their album is imminent, and people are really going for their wartime chic and their doomy synthpop and their general air of bookish sheep in steely wolves’ clothing. For them to reissue one of their defining moments (so far) makes a lot of sense. It’s not a very haughty thing to do, and that seems a little out of character, but I’m sure we’ll all muddle through.
In the meantime, this astonishing collective are also re-releasing an early single, in order to promote their album – it’s called ‘Man Alive’. And, sad to say, they seem to be getting only a fraction of the response that their fellow synthpoppers are.
For the LIFE of me, I cannot see why this should be the case.
(Here’s the video. It’s got gauntlets in.)
OK, so the verses are a little twiddly, this could alienate a few confused ears. And they do seem to be musically in a hurry to rush on to their next idea sometimes. But everything (everything) is redeemed by that chorus. A chorus which is just plain perfect. A chorus which doesn’t even have to make sense to Make Sense. A chorus which also happens contains one of the best throwaway pop lyrics of the new millennium, namely:
“I wanna know what happened to your boyfriend
Cos he was looking at me like ‘whoah!’”
I’ll repeat that, in case you didn’t quite feel the magnificence the first time around:
“I wanna know what happened to your boyfriend
Cos he was looking at me like ‘whoah!’”
C’mon, that’s amazing. It possibly helps if you hear it sung, but even so, “he was looking at me like ‘whoah!’”? Who has the NERVE to write a lyric like that? The sheer GALL of it is astonishing. The brilliant glee of whacking some daft slang in the middle of a densely constructed, angular pop song. And this from a band who are more than comfortable singing about a Faraday cage, or constructing a properly meaty image like “I’m watching the A4 paper taking over the guillotine”.
And even if they weren’t good with the words, that chorus, that glorious chorus! It’s at the exact opposite end of the scale to what Hurts are doing. It’s kind of goofy and silly, and floppy of limb instead of haughty and reserved. And it comes after those verses, which can be a little like a musical assault course, although they’re a lot more pop than they seem on first listen. There is that pillowy close-harmony bit, after all. Everything (everything) about this song, apart from the title, is massively accessible and friendly. And this may be the problem.
I wonder if the band’s innate awkwardness is preventing their wider success. It’s like no-one really knows what they want. The verses demand approval from chin-strokey art-rock-snobs, the chorus wants to teach the world to sing. And the two things are sadly incompatible, partly because of the snob thing, but also because the world can’t sing the verses without spitting its teeth out.
In any case, this is why nothing else seems quite good enough right now. It’s basically exactly what great pop music is all about, and yet it probably won’t go to No.1. We should all be ashamed.
Or grateful. It’s so hard to tell.
Download: Out now
www.everything-everything.co.uk
BBC Music page
(Fraser McAlpine)
Popwreckoning says: “Expect big things from these Northerners.”
Popped Music says: “You would certainly not say this was electro in the same sense as you would bands such as Klaxons who certainly have used similar instrumentation to achieve a very different sound.”
Drowned In Sound’s Wendy Roby says: “Sometimes there are bands you want to give two marks to – one for their high goals, and one for how successfully they have netted them…To my mind Everything Everything get a starred-A for both.”
View full post on BBC – Chart blog
