Everything Everything Is Everything
I flirted with The 1975 a bit recently. It wasn't serious, and I'm not sure if it's going to lead to anything. I tend to be commitment-phobic with bands who switch lanes so often, if I'm honest with myself. I mean, how can you ever trust them to be consistently above average when they're careening between 90's post-glam reverence and Bon Iver trutherism that spends half its time playing dress-up in the garb of roller rink funk? Maybe it's me, maybe they’re amazing and I just need to crack the code. They seem sweet, their emotion bleeds through on some of their songs, that's for sure, and they can fill a dance floor to bursting. But sometimes I just feel like I need a band that wants me for me, and not my shared reference points, y'know?
The one thing I can't deny about my dalliance with them is that it made me remember one of my old flames: Everything Everything. That band…ugh…thinking of those jams still makes my knees buckle a bit.
I noticed it when the 5-ers let loose on "Love It If We Made It." A tremendous song: impact, sex, and tunefulness smoothly sliding by one another in a spiked punch bowl. There is something beautiful that shines through in even its ugliest parts, and that is usually a slam dunk for me. But during the hook, when the lads were going four brands of insane, I remembered "MY KZ, UR BF" by Everything Everything and all of a sudden "Love It…" became difficult to take seriously on its own merits.
The lead single from 2010's Man Alive is a nocturnal beast that springs to life after its near acapella open. It's vibrance, heat, snare hits, twinkling synths. Jonathan Higgs is giving it his all here in his vocal, daring anyone within earshot to not be seduced. His distinctive cadences don't rely on their unique rhythms alone, he pushes himself to Daryl Hall heights with rounded falsettos that skitter through the tune's melodic path, ducking and weaving in a mix that somehow leaves just enough breathing room for all the elements.
EE has referred to themselves as "poptimists", and they've been called "maximalists" by the press, but somehow each of those definitions fall short while containing kernels of the truth. The band is a veritable riff machine on "MY KZ…", several progressions fight for the lead and none of them win out. This results in a perfectly interlocking groove that glides over all. Meanwhile the bass and drums are piloted by Jeremy Pritchard and Michael Spearman with a daredevil's disregard for risk. Pritchard brings the basslines up to a roiling simmer that never quite spills over the edges of the pot; Spearman is a magician with his percussion in high-attack mode, punctuating the cycles of the song with perfect snaps or going off like James Joyce with no filter when the dynamic calls for it.
Lyrically, the song is a feverish stream-of-conciousness recount of infighting, confusion, and mass destruction. Listeners can be forgiven for getting a little lost early on if only because the pronouncements are rapid-fire and the wordplay is unceasing. Songwriting that paints a picture of "separation" and blurs its lines from metaphor into idiom in a single breath while working in a hook that includes the phrase "It's like we're sitting in a Faraday cage" is not pulling any punches; this song has come to lay waste to bodies and minds with a frenetic and multi-quadrant onslaught.
All I am saying is this: if there is a sub-genre that can be constructed from synth-driven kitchen-sink 80's dance homage, then I think it's possible that Everything Everything distilled it perfectly in this one song. And hey, I'm not saying I'm done with The 1975 by any means. If they come through with something that is a little more uniquely them as opposed to being obliquely someone else, and they pull it off consistently, I can totally see us fooling around again. But I have to work on the "me" for a bit. I need to be out there, slaying the sidewalks with my strut and leaving tears in my wake. "MY KZ, UR BF" is the soundtrack I need for that, and, as of yet, those other lads from Manchester aren’t touching it.
