As one of the great underrated anthems of the 2000s, Art Brut’s ‘We Formed A Band’ was a curiously shaped beast. It was easy, far too easy, to listen to that briliant chorus of “Look at us, we formed a band” and hear a charming if posed detachment, a band saying “Oh yeah, we formed a band but it was no big deal, it was inevitable”. Except Art Brut weren’t detached. They were dead serious and formed their band because (as the lyrics to the chorus made clear) it was what they were born to do.
Far closer in spirit to that misunderstood interpretation is Breton. Breton really did just form a band. They were already covering almost every other artistic base in their BretonLABS collective, so forming a band was a logical next step, just another tentacle on the octopus. But if there’s something almost slightly mundane about their progress, there is nothing mundane about the outcome. We’ll probably end up labelling Breton indie. We’re wrong. Oh sure, indie has been pulled out of its old shape a lot in recent years, but this goes a lot further. It’s pretty damn pop, occasionally thunderously dubsteppy, often dipping in the same waters as r’n’b, and is shot right through with an electro spirit.
Take bold opener ‘Pacemaker’. Firstly it takes some bespoke string samples courtesy of German composer Hauschka, slices and dices, and comes up with a song that sounds like brilliant 1990s number one hit ‘Your Woman’ by White Town, albeit with a maximalist collection of sounds, handclaps, chopped vocals, parping synth bass. It’s a manifesto and a hark back to a bona fide pop hit. It’s certainly one of the best openers to any album so far in 2012.
A lot of the jigsaw pieces from ‘Pacemaker’ recur throughout the album. The chopped strings pop up as pizzicato punches at the end of ‘Oxides’, an initially aimless ditty which erupts into a heavy dubstep breakdown; in ‘Edward The Confessor’ where the strings act as an elegiac counterpoint to the hectic modernity of the other instruments and the frantic vocals; in ‘2 Years’, just four tracks in, everything is slowed down to a stately march, its hiphop drums giving the violins space to breath and spread out between what sounds like a sad robot lamenting the loss of something precious. Elsewhere reviewers have wondered why Breton bothered asking Hauschka for strings if they were only going to slice them up, but it feels appropriate in the context of the rest of the album. Even when Breton are attempting a more straightforward indie song like ‘Wood And Plastic’ there are still fragments of brass and swooshes of strings, as if the great late 90s indie strings overdose never happened.
Foals are an obvious comparison, their similar approach to jerkiness and chopping things up is played out here, but there’s also a shared sense of loss and anguish which is hard to pin down specifically but is ever-present. Sometimes the comparison is even more obvious, ‘Interference’ especially employs the mid-00s widdly indie guitar sounds but also a very Foals-ish vocal, all ‘woahs’ and shouts of “It’s an anachronism you come to rely on/It’s a skeleton”. It’s just the right combination of imagery and bollocks, although it’s not as consistent as Foals’ work. At the top end of the scale ‘Jostle’ is the best of the lot lyrically, gleeful is-it-nonsense-is-it-
And yet, despite the jigsaw approach it’s actually the two least jagged songs which are best. ‘Ghost Note’ floats along in an electric soup, sounds stolen from electro and dubstep allowed to ebb and flow, even down to a half-speed beat breakdown. Concluding the album is ‘The Commission’, a soundscape into which broken glass samples and almost-vocals are cast, a melancholy wasteland which accompanies the end of a night out which promised so much but ended in a mournful mess. Perhaps that’s a good way to describe this album. It is messy and it is mournful but it has every right to be both. It’s not going to provide any great lyrical insights, but it does bring a startling and effective collection of pieces together seamlessly. There is nothing inevitable about it and yet for Breton perhaps there was. They formed a band indeed.
[Rating:4]
