Follow-Ups

I’ve picked up three long-awaited follow-up albums recently. The first was Beck’s Guero, which follows his drastic change of pace (and my favourite of his), Sea Change. Reviewers called it a return to form, which had the perverse effect of making me hold off on buying it. But now that I have, I reckon they got it wrong; this is one of his best albums, more satisfying than Midnight Vultures or even Mutations. Guero is a loping, laid-back mix of electro retro, Latin flourishes, and Odelay-era inventiveness. It may even tie with that as his second-best album.

If ever there was a band under intense follow-up pressure, it’s Coldplay. In the three years since A Rush of Blood to the Head they’ve transformed from indie darlings to stadium rockers, with the associated backlash from those who never liked them, or never liked them much. I won’t be joining that chorus—not with my admiration for their early albums a link or two away. The people who never liked them are, after all, not going to help you decide whether X&Y is worth hearing. Nor are those who don’t like Gwyneth Paltrow, or naming children after fruit. If you don’t like what Chris Martin called his kid, don’t call yours Granny Smith; and if you don’t like his voice, don’t listen to Coldplay. I don’t like that Starsailor bloke’s, yet sleep soundly, undisturbed by the pitter-patter of new Starsailor releases.

So: is X&Y any good? It’s actually been hard to tell through all the cultural noise surrounding the band. After several listens, though, it’s starting to emerge as a decent successor to Parachutes and A Rush of Blood, without the freshness of the former or the breakthrough qualities of the latter. If A Rush of Blood made them contenders for U2’s stadium throne, X&Y steals that throne, fits it with a monster donk and mag wheels, and takes it for a burn around the track; but somewhere along the way they still get lapped. The U2 influences are almost embarrassing: there’s Edge-like guitar all over X&Y, and at times you’d swear it was a Brian Eno production. Another Eno-produced band, the mighty James, lurks behind a track or two, as do Suede and, of course, Radiohead. What’s left over sounds like Coldplay’s old stuff, and leaves you wondering where the new stuff is.

That said, I like U2, James, Suede, Radiohead, and Coldplay’s old stuff. And on balance, I like X&Y. Golden Delicious, fetch my slippers.

My most eagerly awaited follow-up has been Röyksopp’s The Understanding, the successor to Melody A.M., an album that I and the collective population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland rather enjoyed. Once again, the advance buzz was slightly worrying; apparently, this was no Melody P.M., but a radical change in direction.

Welllllll, yeah, I guess. But it still sounds (a) like Röyksopp and (b) pretty darn good to me. The opening track, “Triumphant”, has the epic build and drive of a great closing number on any other album—there’s no better track to have on your headphones as you weave through the crowds streaming away from a major shopping street that’s just been closed off by police during anti-G8 demonstrations. And there are another two or three tracks just as epic and as good. The others hop around various styles of electronica, with their strong guest performers including one who sounds like that woman who sang Gollum’s theme in The Two Towers (but isn’t).

Echoes of their distinctive original sound have, it’s true, been kept to a minimum, but any other strategy would have been a mistake, I think; there’ll be time for a retro Melody B.C. another day. The Understanding is, like Lemon Jelly’s ’64-’95, a follow-up to an undeniable classic that makes the changes in direction necessary for it to stand on its own. Exactly what X&Y doesn’t do, in fact.

14 July 2005 · Music