The Maccabees have set out with an intriguing new concept and carried it off immaculately. There isn’t a flaw on the album, which is a massive achievement for five scrubbers from the south coast.
The Maccabees have set out with an intriguing new concept and carried it off immaculately. There isn’t a flaw on the album, which is a massive achievement for five scrubbers from the south coast.
The Maccabees – Colour It In
Eccentric is a word that’s been applied to so many British bands in recent years that it’s practically become a euphemism for "self-consciously weird" and more often than not "pretty bloody awful". So to label the The Maccabees as an eccentric rock act is to damn them with very faint praise indeed. It is also rather accurate. However, in this case "eccentric" does not mean "pretty bloody awful", because what the latest band of young shavers from Brighton have that so many of their peers don’t is genuine originality, something that’s become about as rare as the proverbial rocking horse excreta.
Colour It In manages to create a totally new and unique song-writing form, taking simple melody-driven three-chord rock music and blending in brilliantly timed shifts in key and pace. All the songs switch gracefully between blitzing, jittery power chords to woozy, gentle meanderings without ever losing a sense of giddiness and excitement that most bands would give their assorted appendages to achieve. Through their lead singer Orlando Weeks, The Maccabees also have a potent weapon available to them – his swooning voice lilts and warbles throughout these utterly infectious songs and lifts them to further levels still. I’m guessing, but had the band been fronted by another vocalist then the songs would lose a significant bit of the edge that they have. And they really do have an edge about them – while The View et al might be capable of stringing a few obvious, crowd-pleasing motifs together, The Maccabees frequently transcend that sort of mindlessness to write songs that are not only implausibly infectious, (I defy anyone to get the excitable, harmonic climax to Latchmere out of their heads), but also intriguing and intelligent – certainly not something that you’d associate with any of the British bands currently camping out in the prime-time radio play-lists.
Another thing that makes The Maccabees such a breath of fresh air is that their subject material is mercifully different from pretty much every other band currently on the circuit. Whereas just about everyone else sings about either a) sex and cocaine or b) how grim it is in London/Dundee/Up North, The Maccabees are breathlessly romantic, and in the most genuine and sexy manner. The lyrics themselves may occasionally be a trifle oblique but the delivery is such that it only serves to make them more interesting still. They also smatter the songs liberally with humour and the sort of down-to-earth British-ness that too many bands seem to have forgotten while they desperately try and come up with a formula to crack America – the aforementioned Latchmere is an ode to a local swimming pool (which has a wave machine). It’s pretty tough to conceive of Alex Turner (allegedly a great lyricist) clambering down from his working class pedestal long enough to write a song with the same kind of wit, fun and subtle absurdity about it. Of course, far more important than endearingly daft lyrics is the fact that every single over song on the album has an absolutely blinding tune. It’s real bedroom-dancing stuff.
This, then, is a sparkling affair – an album that has matched knock-down tunes to intelligence and originality with more success that could ever be imagined. The Maccabees have set out with an intriguing new concept and carried it off immaculately. There isn’t a flaw on the album, which is a massive achievement for five scrubbers from the south coast. And it does sound as if these songs have been made entirely for fun and for the love of it. How often can you honestly say that this really sounds like there was never a single thought about the money/girls/drugs/fame available to a band who "make it". Obviously I can’t use the word "great" to describe Colour It In because that word can only ever be used when an album is likely to sell several million copies and be halfway to universally adored, and The Maccabees might just be a bit too clever, intelligent and defiantly British to ever actually achieve that (although they do provide a real glimmer of hope for the increasingly moronic rock scene in the UK), but this is pretty much as good an album as I’ve ever heard. Simple as that really.
Words: Matt Gregory