Open Season
British Sea Power
Published by Under The Radar
Open
Season
British Sea Power
Published by Under The Radar
Right
away you’ll notice that British Sea Power’s second release isn’t
titled like a dusty hardback. And unlike 2003’s The Decline of British
Sea Power, it doesn’t require small print to accommodate the bulge
of its literary aspirations. Or a sleeve of depleted uranium to contain the
armor-buckling guitars within. But lo, Open Season is another superb
album from Brighton, England’s reckless romantics.
A mere minute into The Decline, British Sea Power unloaded intensity
like it was stamped with an expiration date. Matters Dostoyevsky were off the
chest just in time for some shrill guitar reckoning to assume duties existential.
Later on, things got downright gorgeous, but never were they far from derailing
in flames, impaired by the rush just past.
Taking its downtime in the meadow rather than the fiction section, Open
Season applies a looser grip and cleaner lines. Its majesty unfolds at
a measured pace, beginning with the rich, muscular melodies of “It Ended
on an Oily Stage,” which offers a strangely green rebuke in “He
found God/In a Wiltshire field/Whilst you did not.” It delights in mid-tempo
possibilities and all-inclusive emotional pull. Manic episodes rear up in “Leaving
Here” like fragments of guitar-era Radiohead, roughing up the album’s
mostly placid stretch of grounded space rock.
Further outdoorsmanship inhabits “North Hanging Rock,” a gorgeous
slow build with as many bird chirps as words (“Drink yourself of greenery/Become
part of the scenery” being the primary ones). Then there’s subject
matter that only a band that would name itself British Sea Power would attempt
to make rock. For instance, “Larsen B,” otherwise known as an Antarctic
ice shelf, which mingles love song conventions with maps and imagination. Still
making sport of the notion that they’re just a rock ’n’ roll
band, these courageous lads are ever unconcerned with rankling garage aesthetes
and anti-snobs.
In terms of sound and construction, Open Season clings closer to the
metronomic security of Coldplay or Interpol than might be expected from the
loose-cannon captains of The Decline, but that’s not inherently
bad. That which rages must also rest, and this rogue sleeps with one eye open.