Manchester indie group Everything Everything are back with their fourth studio album, A Fever Dream, and follow up to their massive hit Get To Heaven from 2015.
But will we be happy to have them back, or want to leave them in the Distant Past?
The Mancunian group formed up fully in Salford University in 2006, and honestly with a naming process as Niven (guitar and vocals) has described as follows: “The idea as I saw it was to try to take contemporary R&B pop music and fashion a vaguely Futurist project out of it, and between the two of us we chose the name Everything Everything, a détournement of sorts of an over-saturated media culture into something idealistic and expansive”. You’d struggle to see them as anything but a sort of pretentious, young, indie band. To be honest, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark, but that’s not stopped them charting well the past few years.
As a band with a track once touted as ‘The Hottest Track in the World Right Now’ by Radio 1’s Zane Lowe, the benchmark is high. Will the new album keep this lofty height?
A Fever Dream is the fourth studio album by Everything Everything
As the album opens with Night of the Long Knives, a title that could be deemed inappropriate, but that aside, the opening track is a banger. Jonathan Higgs’ standout lead vocals and falsetto take us back to the massive hit that was The Distant Past. A big, energetic, electro-indie beat and throbbing bass underline the high-pitched vocals and synths to carry us into the opening of this track.
Following a similar formula but with a slowing in tempo is Good Shot, Good Soldier. At first, the song is so reminiscent of their older material that you may be tempted to simply skip past the track as I was with a finger hovering over the skip button; stay with it. Listen past the dynamic shifts and typical indie rhythms and you’ve got a lyrically winning track, politically charged without labouring the point, it’s good work.
Ivory Tower attempts to follow this political charge later in the album, but feels far more underdeveloped, where the former was nuanced and subtle, this is in-your-face and blunt. With a hook that simply sings ‘I’m in my ivory tower, I’m in my ivory ivory, I’m in my I’m in my ivory ivory I’m in, I’m in my ivory tower, I’m in my ivory’ you might understand why (…and yes, I had to count those for accuracy).
Can’t Do moves a distance away from the more electronic side of the band’s repertoire (well, a little bit anyway). The telecaster style guitar picks and strums under more brash and basic drumline whilst Higgs’ vocals lurch from a grittier Mancunian spoken word to his falsetto pitches in the chorus.
With another shift from standard form comes in Run the Numbers. The song leaps from shoegazey synth, sounding dreamlike and lilting to growling, surprisingly heavy guitars and drum beats. It may lack the lyrical complexity of some of its contemporaries on the tracklist, but it’s undeniably good. One gripe is that the synth solo instead of a guitar is a little hipster for this reviewer.
I feel I’d like Desire more as a song if the vocals took a direction other than high-pitched. Lyrically the song is sound, with lines like ‘Took my mind and left a hollow twin’ to emphasise the titular theme of the song it could be a lot better without the entire song, guitar riffs and all being kept in the upper pitch register.
The entire album isn’t devoted to fizzing indie-pop positive energy, however, no sir. Big Game is a welcome drop into the more angsty realm of the so often retrospective genre. The song is a complex tapestry of multiple tones of synths, a repetitive pluck of the guitar which leads into distorted strums and a heavy sawtooth bass as the song progresses. The song is more poetic than your average poppy formula and helps break the album up.
Unfortunately, attempting and failing to follow this more melancholic formula is Put Me Together. The song falls flat as it sluggishly pulls along its five minute running time with very few positives to redeem itself.
The title track, A Fever Dream is, in what can be a rarity for albums these days, a real stand out track of the album. Starting with a pace similar to Put Me Together you could understand not wanting to endure another six minutes of a similar track. However, the track builds pace as it goes and leads towards the final section of the song. The bassline plumbs a depth rarely heard in indie, or indeed outside of EDM and trap beats whilst the synth complements Higgs’ like a secondary voice.
As the small interlude track of New Deep, a somewhat pointless track, leads us into White Whale, we’re unfortunately left with a bad taste from the Northern indie boys. The track, whilst technically accomplished feels whiny and self-indulgent, as it warps its way through its synth-ridden riff. It’s, sadly, a poor way to exit what is overall a decent album.
Author: Steve, Southgate Store
