Zeroes’ Heroes 9: Maxïmo Park - A Certain Trigger [2005]
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
The further i proceed on this list of lists of lists, the more frantic i get whenever i have to write a bit about the next album on it. I start doubting my common sense while skipping through the tracks of aforementioned album, realizing how bloody good it is, and deciding it should be higher up. So as i’ve rearranged the entire order of the list, i start skipping through the tracks of the album that became number 9 instead of Maxïmo Park’s A Certain Trigger. And then i realize how bloody useless it is. From now on, all you’re going to see here are modern day classics, and perhaps, apart from the top two, they’re all equal to sit at number 9 just as well as number 3.
Maxïmo Park is in this list, and as i’m researching and re-listening their debut album, i see a lot of similarities between them and the previous entry on the Zeroes Heroes’ list, Bloc Party. Part of the post-punk/new wave revival of the mid Zeroes, a debut album produced by Paul Epworth and nominated for the Mercury Prize, to name a few. However, wether you had read about them, saw them or heard them even around that time, it would have been impossible from the start to dismiss them as ‘just a band’.
Beneath only that most superficial surface, there are a lot of oddities going on with Maxïmo Park. They were the first ‘conventional’ pop band to sign to Warp Records - known for their progressive electronic music like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. Lead singer Paul Smith looked like an extra from A Clockwork Orange who easily could have had his own spin-off movie. His lyrics stay far away from the usual angst of bands like Bloc Party, but instead center around the intense frustation that comes from boredom, echoing The Smiths instead of Joy Division, quoting Albert Einstein instead of Kurt Cobain. And where Bloc Party was a band that stuffed a great idea in every track on Silent Alarm, Maxïmo Park start their songs with a great idea, have another one during the first chorus, and discard that one too by the time they get to the bridge.
The best thing about all that, and A Certain Trigger to be specific, is that it left a weak first impression. The music was unfathomable at first glance, the only songs that hit home almost straight away were Apply Some Pressure and Once, A Glimpse. Serving as a catalyst for the rest of the album, those tracks softened my ears for the next step, where for instance Postcard Of A Painting, Going Missing and The Coast Is Always Changing revealed their true identity. By the time i had listened to the album quite a few times and agreed it was OK despite Graffiti, Limassol and Acrobat, BANG!, it hit me right in the face that those were actually among the best of the whole album.
The twitch comes partly from their deceptively complicated song structures. Their songs seem to slide from verse to chorus to bridge and it’s over, but in the mean time you get 16 bars of pure genius like the ecstatic, whirling bridge on Graffiti. Their melodies can be lightheartedly catchy, but get obscured oft and again by rhythmical curiosities, like the drum-roll that doesn’t fit in Apply Some Pressure.
When i’d peeled off all those layers of A Certain Trigger, its heart lays bare, and it was bittersweet, smart, sexual, frustated, angry, bored, romantic, stupid, spiteful, yearning and witty. The time it took me to learn to know and appreciate it made it feel like a old friend. Music that achieves that, never fails to touch you everytime you listen to it, adding to the friendship. Well, more of that for every album coming up next.
Leuke afbeelding! ;)