★★★★★
Five Stars
I remember where I was when I first heard alt-J’s debut album, An Awesome Wave, from beginning to end. It was on a routine journey home from London, and as the train passed through the ever-extending suburbs, I got a glimpse into the lighted windows of row upon row of tall terraced houses that back onto the track. The train flitted past a flick-book of anonymous lives, random people living their evening hours, unaware that their movements were captured by fast-moving passers-by, and the music: intense, intimate, fleeting, seemed to fit perfectly.
Alt-J’s fragmented lyrics possessed a kind of modest, commonplace focus, which, when held in impenetrable poetry and shrouded in their signature developing electric folk-rock riffs, imbued the normal with a slightly twisted sense of the surreal. Take the opening lines of ‘Fitzpleasure’ as an example – the song begins, “Tralala, in your snatch fits pleasure, broom-shaped pleasure, / Deep greedy and Googling every corner.” Just like the private worlds viewed from a fast moving train, recognisable images are conjured, but they’re held just out of reach of full comprehension.
Perhaps this was a formula that helped alt-J to create a hugely successful mercury award-winning first album: isolating and reshaping the familiar into something new and distinctive, distanced from its contemporaries. Even the band themselves adhered to this pattern of cloaking normality with artistry, the four camera-shy members obscured for the most part by the Δ symbol of their anti-brand. Whether such an achievement could be sustained in the midst of an industry that seems to have both an insatiable thirst for individuality and a tendency to drain it dry, it remained to be seen.
Two and a half years on and we have our answer. This Is All Yours, a thirteen track LP replete with the same unmistakable craftsmanship and intrigue has arrived, its integrity intact. A similar poetic ambiguity pervades lead-singer Joe Newman’s lyrics, but this time around, there’s a shift in focus from inside the windows to outside, as the songs take on a larger field of vision. The music videos for the singles already released are testament to this. Gone are the dimly-lit domestic scenes of that unforgettable Breezeblocks video, replaced by broad-sweeping landscapes in lead track ‘Hunger of the Pine’:
From the distorted blurry vocals in the background of ‘Intro’ to the hypnotic harmonies at the peak of ‘The Gospel of John Hurt’, words and music are inseparable in the overall effect. That the lines “The idea of life without company fell suddenly / It crashed through the ceiling on me/ And pinned me to the pine’ are set almost disconcertingly to a single acoustic guitar, returning to the soft, gently bouncing chorus line “Are you a pusher or are you a puller?” only makes track 11, ‘Pusher’ darker for the tense contrast.
Other highpoints include ‘Every Other Freckle’ with its dense, rhythmic layers that rise and fall with unfailing energy, and ‘Choice Kingdom’, a compelling requiem that subverts ‘Rule Brittania’ into an echo of something long lost.
And then, of course, there’s ‘Bloodflood pt.II’, the penultimate track on the album and a sequel to the song of the same name on An Awesome Wave. Not only does it allow for the enjoyable task of spotting consistencies – musical and lyrical threads of continuity between two very differently directed albums – it is also a really powerful song in its own right.
Whilst in this track lyrics from ‘Fitzpleasure’ and ‘Bloodflood’ are taken verbatim and reframed in a new simpler and more controlled style, one element in particular on This Is All Yours marks a noticeable shift away from ongoing narrative of An Awesome Wave. And no, it’s not the unexpected appearance of Miley Cyrus in the wings of ‘Hunger of the Pine’…
The other pre-released single, ‘Left Hand Free’, is clearly the anomaly of the album. Although not a bad song, per se, it feels uncomfortably empty in comparison to the other tracks. The reason behind its incongruous inclusion, as a Guardian interview reveals, is that the band were urged by their American label to produce something more accessible that could be marketed at a ‘hit’. If nothing else, it demonstrates the bands versatility in being able to churn out an undeniably catchy tune on demand.
Moreover, the fact that evidence of the commercial pressures and influences of the industry is confined to one song out of thirteen, is proof of alt-J’s resilience to the temptations and pitfalls of early success. They have conquered the notorious challenge of following a well-received debut with an equally accomplished second album, one that tries neither to tread the exact same path nor to experiment too far or reinvent too drastically.
If we are to compare the two, as everyone inevitably will, This Is All Yours feels lighter than its predecessor, the songs less saturated and insistent. As the title would imply, they passively offer themselves to the listener; their tightly interwoven melodies trickling with an ease that could unfairly be mistaken for complacency or weakness. On the contrary, however, this is an album in which less can most definitely be said to be much, much more.
