Brakes – The Beatific Visions

[ampattenden]

Brakes’ second album is a huge departure from the disco punk of their best known single, All Night Disco Party. By contrast, The Beatific Visions features a range of styles, from alt-country Americana, to West Coast balladry, to downright mad careening rock. The left-field sense of humour, however, remains firmly in place.

It all begins rather disappointingly with an unremarkable song characterised by simple riffs but fairly catchy, eccentric vocals. Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with Hold Me In The River, but compared with previous material, it falls well below expectations. It is followed by Margherita, which illicits a sigh as it sounds so much like its predecessor. However, upon listening to the lyrics, such as “it’s clear it’s the fear that keeps us under control”, one notices that it is in fact a collection of thoughts on an Orwellian vision of the world. So strange then, that the music itself sounds like such dumb college rock. The thought occurs that this could be the desired effect.

Listening to the rest of the album only confirms this suspicion that serious thoughts on the world’s issues have been deliberately hidden among an album of red herrings. On one hand, you might find unoriginal, mawkish country-style ramblings about some girl (e.g. If I Should Die Tonight) while on the other, there are deceptive tracks like the minute-and-a-half long Porcupine Or Pineapple?, which sounds like a no-brainer nonsense song in a silly voice (words include, “Porcupine or pineapple……… spiky SPIKY!”) but actually asks a fairly valid question - “Who won the war, what the fuck was that for?”

The other main aspect of the album appears to be a permeating theme of separation versus togetherness. The ‘togetherness’ part consists mainly of the ballads, and an ode to some mystery girl who “makes your heart beat faster” – this latter being a sample of the eponymous track, Beatific Visions, which with its Weezer-crossed-with-happy-Swedish-popsters-I’m-From-Barcelona vibe, is musically one of the album’s more successful songs. The flipside of this theme, the ‘separation’ part, is represented by the aforementioned If I Should Die Tonight; a song which warns “you’re gonna need somebody on your side”; a sweet acoustic ballad promising never to forget Isabel; an amusingly classic country and western style song about technology problems (the first of its kind, I’d wager), Mobile Communication; and the painfully atmospheric, organ-based finale No Return.

This may not sound (or for that matter, be), the best album of the year, or even the month, but it is full of well-hidden surprises, and certainly warrants a listen if only for curiosity value.