Don’t you think it’s so much harder to stay across everything these days?
Back in my younger days, if there had been a band that had had three top two albums, one of which went double platinum, three Brit Award nominations and were about to release album number four, having just announced an arena tour, then chances are I would be more than familiar with most of their output.
However, now, and in this case London Grammar, they have managed to completely pass me by, and I’ve not heard so much as a note of their oeuvre, so it really is a ‘first listen’ for me in every way.
So here we are, and this is indeed their album number four The Greatest Love, which has just been released and it feels there’s a fair bit of anticipation around it being their first since 2021’s Californian Soil.
So, let’s see what all the fuss is about.
“This is my place, my house, my rules.” is something of a statement of intent for the first line that opens the album, from lead single ‘House’, the title of which is quite apt, as it had a dance-like quality to its scuttling beats, it’s quite the lively opener.
But as good as it is, it’s not a patch on the undoubted album highlight ‘Fakest Bitch’ which is absolutely stunning, piano and acoustic led, with vocalist Hannah Reid sounding like peak-All About Eve era Julianne Regan on the frail, sad lilting chorus refrain ‘People don’t change, people stay the same. We are what we are, when you’re falling apart’’ like an art-school Beautiful South.
But just as I’m making plans to delve into their back catalogue on the strength of the first two songs to see what I’ve been missing, it settles into a pattern of same-y much of a muchness. ‘LA’ is as vapid as the title suggests, sounding like a vapid new-Coldplay off-cut, not half as thrilling as it thinks it is, and the effects on the vocal on ‘Ordinary Life’ don’t help matters, as well as the music becoming a tad plodding, the lyrics also start taking an uninteresting turn.
Side two kicks off promisingly with ‘Santa Fe’, and it’s La Isla Bonita-esque feel in the chorus, ‘Santa Fe, Santa Fe, can you love me anyway’ , signs that musically things could get interesting again. ‘I know you like the powder, it makes you louder’ is a hell of a clunky lyric, but they get away with it on ‘Kind Of Man’ due to its throbbing, daytime Ibiza vibes.
Kylie‘s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ seems to be an influence on the forgettable ‘Rescue’, before the beauty that they undoubtedly have in their locker returns on the hypnotic trance of ‘Into Gold’. The title track sees Reid at her sharpest tone on the record, and a sparse piano build towards an orchestral crescendo, a natural enormous closer.
If they could have found such variety, cleverness and heart on at least half of the rest of the tracks, then this would have made for a scintillating record. Instead, at times, there’s not much here to get the heartbeat racing, pleasant enough, truly great in parts with the odd diamond in some quite rough rough, but I’m not sure some of its tracks are strong enough to carry them off triumphantly to an arena audience.
Overall, I’m not too distraught after all that I’ve missed out all these years, but I’ll give this album another go (well, half of it).
