The Big Pink- A Brief History of Love
They’ve been picked for the BBC Sound of 2009 (kind of like winning a lottery ticket to success), have been written about everywhere, wowed a number of festival audiences this summer and now The Big Pink’s debut album is finally with us.
The start of A Brief History of Love, the opening three tracks in particular, is as strong as any you’ll find this year and, with the heady blur between shoegaze and pop, it is exactly what could be hoped for from the album. ‘Too Young To Love’ is a stomping, feedback drenched affair which sums up what is often so bloody fantastic about The Big Pink- it is simultaneously anthemic and highly intimate. Similarly, ‘Dominoes’ is a fully formed, euphoric wave upon the senses. Although it is clearly the most sugar coated, accessible moment on the album and sounds like Kasabian covering Good Charlotte with 90s boy band backing vocals- possibly the lamest ingredients to a song ever- it somehow works perfectly.
However, unlike other bands who have furrowed an edge of experimentalism into the mainstream with recent albums- Animal Collective and The Horrors for example-, The Big Pink often struggle to maintain the momentum that burns so brightly at the beginning of the album. Where other vaguely similar minded albums may be sparkling affairs with ideas developing song by song, The Big Pink suffer from playing their best cards at the start of the game.
‘Love in Vain’, for example, plods along slowly, the bassline dragging its feet to nowhere in particular, while ‘At War With The Sun’ is a good enough tune- with it’s light headed synths and fuzzy guitars, but it’s near impossible to listen to it without feeling constantly on the verge of hearing the echo of Ian Brown whispering “I don’t have to sell my soul/ He’s already in me”.
Much of the problem is that, especially for a band with such a deliberately fusing of droning rock and dance rhythms, a lot of the songs are neither oddly uplifting nor grindingly downbeat but, instead, exist in a sticky, stagnant quagmire in between. ‘Golden Pendulum’, for example, lacks urgency and innovation and unlike many of the bands that seem to have gone into the influence of their sound- bands like My Bloody Valentine and Spiritualised- it becomes mind numbing rather than mind blowing.
That’s not to say that the album, as a whole, suffers from this completely. Previous single ‘Velvet’ is an epic, sweeping moment of brilliance which highlights the true majestic potential of the band. ‘Tonight’, meanwhile, lights up the backend of the album with a wobbly, funky swagger and as much as it is instantaneous and catchy, it is also an interesting and vibrant number.
Whittled down considerably and tweaked just a little, A Brief History of Love could be an EP fit to entertain a king (albeit a king into his mind bending, psychedelic noise-gaze) but, as it is, The Big Pink have not quite managed to come up with such a release. While this debut shows the band’s potential to create brilliantly soaring anthems cut up with wailing guitars and stuttering electronic beats, it also highlights the tendency they have to crawl along with little purpose. The Big Pink surely have a genuinely incredible, exciting and masterful album inside them somewhere but this, unfortunately, isn’t it.
