Meet Me In St. Louis - Variations On Swing

by Simon T Diplock

Guaranteed to leave you as confused as it does impressed and satisfied

"Buried deep here there are basslines, jumbled noises and vocal hooks that will swim from your speakers to your brain like a shark looking for a meal."

People have got their hopes up for this. Indie tastemakers at Drowned In Sound have said “Meet Me In St. Louis are the closest thing the UK have got to a hard-touring At the Drive-In-style outfit” and the band’s burgeoning little label Big Scary Monsters has pretty much emptied its bank account into the campaign for this, their debut full-length. Even the NME have got involved. No pressure then.

Not that the Guildford band sound like they’ve cracked at all, they don’t even sound like they care what anyone else thinks. In fact from start to finish ‘Variations On Swing’ actually fights to defy expectation, approval and routine. Off-time pulses, electronic noise and awkward riffs flood forward from songs so taut they could snap. Tobias Hayes’ wonderfully shaky but captivating voice is capable of putting goosebumps on goosebumps and how the dude can sing lines like “If you woke up, and opened wide, / Your eye contact alone would burn a hole into my retina”, yet make them sound like flowing love poems is bloody wonderful.

The issue with all this reckless experimentation and incendiary rock though, is that it takes four or five, or maybe even ten or twenty listens before the disparate parts and vibrant oddness begin to gel. At first ‘Well You Damn Well Should!’ feels like it only wants to confuse, even the band themselves losing touch with its bastard beat, ‘Eins Zwei Drei Hasselhoff!’ pushes the hysterics too hard in places and even first single ‘All We Need…’ is a shifting, genre-hungry commotion.

However, when the band nail it, when they get things just right, they produce enough white-hot energy to power the goddamn bullet train. ‘…Torso…’is a fidgety tale of climax, crescendo and calm, ‘I Beat Up The Bathroom…’ is a tiny orchestral wonder and ‘I Am Champagne…’, rescued from it’s ramshackle beginnings on the band’s first EP, is now a solid gold art-rock riot. And then, buried even deeper, there are basslines, jumbled noises and vocal hooks that will swim from your speakers to your brain like a shark looking for a meal and then, maybe immediately or maybe only after really, truly listening, the jaws will clamp down and great, dark sections of songs will be stuck in your synapses and neurons for days.

‘Variations…’ might not completely please everyone who’s got their hopes up - this definitely isn’t the ‘best British debut in a decade’ that a few folks are billing it as. But it is a brilliant shot of skill, style and energy that’s guaranteed to leave you as confused as it does impressed and satisfied.
tiernan said on September 27th 2007 [report abuse]

brillzor

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