When you’re up there in the pop pantheon with likes of Max ‘…Baby One More Time’ Martin and Xenomania (aka, Girls Aloud’s writers) it seems almost oddly regressive to want to form your own indie band. But that’s what Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, writers of ‘Toxic’ and ‘Sweet Dreams My LA Ex’ amongst others, have done with Miike Snow. They, along with singer Andrew Wyatt, are now on album number two, an album which sees them drifting more towards the realms of… pop.
It was practically mandatory when Miike Snow’s first album came out for the mentions of their pop alter egos to take pride of place in the reviews, and perhaps they were hoping that by the time this second opus arrived that there would be less need to mention it. But if anything it feels more relevant to this record than it did to the first. Put simply they’ve filtered their own band, sieving their first album for the best bits and recycling and remodelling those. To rescue them from the negative connotations of pop for a moment, these are the producers who gave Britney arguably her weirdest single in ‘Piece Of Me’, so the pop element here is hardly the auto-tuned robot-voice over a 90s dance beat mess that most pop appears to be today. Instead it resembles a series of experiments in taking bits of those sort of songs and using them in different ways, putting the rave keyboards and manipulated vocals to use on something more than listening to Marvin The Paranoid Android trying to pull over the sounds of the best of 2Unlimited.
That having been said, Happy To You is not wholly successful. The template for a lot of the songs is ‘Silvia’, the standout track from their self-titled debut album. It’s a wise choice, ‘Silvia’ sent Wyatt’s voice looping around inside a digitised machine but without losing the emotional punch at its core, and did so by building around a chiming piano and military drum rolls. All three of the opening tracks on Happy To You jump straight into this pool. Plonk! echo the piano chords. Rattatatat! roll the drums. Ok, so ‘Enter The Jokers’ Lair’ starts deceptively with a swinging drone noisy, but ‘The Wave’ and ‘Devil’s Work’ both follow the pattern. Of the three it’s ‘The Devil’s Work’ which is the best by miles, one of the album’s standouts, bringing a glam stomp, sassy brass and a sense of urgency to the template. If anything its presence undermines the first two tracks, showing them up by association.
The other standout tracks are the ones which add something to the template. ‘Bavarian #1 (Say You Will)’ brings a great falsetto chorus once you get past the irritating whistling in the first verse (the melody is taken up by a synth from the second verse to much less irritating effect, proving once more that whistling is the hardest instrument to master), and the really stupid title. ‘Black Tin Box’ sees a proper deviation, sounding like a weird tribute to Fever Ray, more moody and with the vocal modifier set to ‘evil rumble’ rather than ‘robot on rollercoaster’, although without quite reaching fellow Swede Karin Dreijer Andersson‘s menacing atmosphere. ‘Paddling Out’ finishes the album on a high, taking Miike Snow the closest they come to a house anthem, and is brilliant for it, the pianos sounding euphoric and the beats thunderous and dance-inspiring.
But for all these highlights it never feels like a gripping listen. Apart from the slight tedium of the piano/military beat/robot voice template, lyrically it swings between nondescript and irritatingly trite. ‘God Help This Divorce’ is the worst offender, throwing bells and harps at its chorus of “She was a beauty queen/But I held her down” in a sea of saccharine which nevertheless doesn’t stop Wyatt’s vocals making those lyrics sound less like a plaintive and moving mea culpa, and more like a really sinister serial killer anthem. Elsewhere too many obvious rhymes and moments of jarring tweeness dilute the effectiveness of some of the tracks. Wyatt has a voice which wavers between capturing the same charming territory of MGMT and coming across as so slight and waif-like that it would surprise anyone to see him in real life (bearded surfer-dude).
In parts this is a really good album, and the less good tracks aren’t actively bad, apart from ‘God Help This Divorce’, so it’s certainly worth your ears’ attention, but it’s just a little frustrating to hear the good bits and the less good bits in such close proximity. Imagine an album where it’s all this good. Maybe next time around.
Out now
[Rating:3]
