The 1975 ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’ – Review

31st May 2018 feels like a lifetime ago for a variety of reasons but it was on that day that The 1975 announced their fourth album’s title ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’. July 2019, still a lifetime ago, was when they dropped the lead single and reiterated that the album ‘had to be out’ before they headlined Reading and Leeds festival on August Bank Holiday Weekend. Now, nine months and a further six singles down the line, following two public delays, brexit, and in the midst of a global pandemic, we finally have the album. ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’ is a messy, sprawling, inessant, contradictory, brilliant, unapologetic love letter from The 1975 to the 1975. This is either everything you love, or everything you hate, about the best, and most divisive, band of the past decade.

Sometimes bands give you more when what you really need is less. The 1975 are not one of those bands. I mean obviously they give you ‘more’ (‘Notes on a Conditional Form’ features 22 songs) but the ‘more’ has always kind of been the point. ‘Too much’. Often ‘much to much’. If In the past they’ve been able to cohere their various ideas in to something relatively tight, well that was probably more accidental than anything else. ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’ is sprawling by design. It’s consciously a buffet. Its much too muchness is a reflection of the way we consume modern media. As a consequence, you will find The 1975’s heaviest songs plotted alongside their most delicate. Their most introspective songs alongside their most goofy. Their most experimental songs alongside their most accessible.

There are various musical threads that weave through the fabric of the record. George has developed into a sophisticated producer, and his forays into British bass music yield some of the album’s most inventive moments. From ‘Frail State of Mind’ and ‘I Think There’s Something You Should Know’s anxious, skittering takes on Garage to ‘Shiny Collarbone’s deconstruction of Dancehall and ‘Having No Head’s more obviously indebted homage to Jon Hopkins. A drizzly, late night atmosphere hangs over the album, particularly in these stretches, which compliments Matty’s self conscious introspection.

At the other extreme are a series of gleaming, lovesick guitar songs that ride major chords out of the gloom. ‘You and Me Together Song’ channels late 90s melodic rock to describe both the romance and the realism of being in an adult relationship. ‘We went to winter wonderland and It was shit but we were happy’. It’s one of the least adorned and affected songs they’ve ever produced and it gets you like a lollipop on a hot summer day. ‘Then, Because She Goes’ pulls a similar trick while ‘Roadkill’s sturdier, but no less sugary, take on the genre invokes the highs and lows of life on the road. Here Matty employs a rambling, stream of consciousness style to divulge way more than we needed to know about his ‘tucked up erection’ and the time he ‘pissed myself on a Texan intersection’. It’s not the only song to graphically describe his private bodily functions. The aim, if there is one, seems to be to demystify and deglamorise the rock n roll lifestyle. He is deliberately putting his screw ups and insecurities on show. ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’ is how he opens the glorious r&b flecked ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything denied’, skewering the mythic ‘Fucking In a car, shooting heroin’, line from arguably the band’s most iconic song ‘Love it if we Made It’. It’s an overshare, certainly, but reflective of how time and time again Healy positions himself in a candid and unflattering light to lower your defences. The album is ultimately, in part at least, a deconstruction of the rockstar ego. It brushes off any trace of excess or extravagance and hones in on something eminently honest and relatable.

Though the band do bury the lede somewhat. They use the opening two numbers – ‘The 1975’ and ‘People’ – to convey urgent social messages about climate change and political and social disillusionment. But after this the band spend the next eighty minutes looking inward, not outward. ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’ feels like an elaboration on the topics first raised on 2016’s ‘I Like it When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It’ (it never gets old writing that). These songs are about feeling too fragile to step outside your house while seeking intimate connections with strangers over the Internet. They’re about falling in love with the wrong person and feeling uncomfortable at parties. About feeling like someone you don’t recognise and, sometimes, not feeling anything at all.

Matty can be pompous and melodramatic. At his worst he gestures at progressive values in a shallow way through a kind of virtue signalling. There’s the careless reference to Pinegrove on ‘The Birthday Party’, for example, and the obscure depiction of a gay Christian’s internal conflict on on ‘JC 2005 God Bless America’ (not to mention opening track ‘The 1975’, which is given over in its entirety to the well meaning but increasingly polarising Greta Thunberg). It’s not that these topics should be out of bounds, rather that he frequently fails to explore them in anything more than a superficial or glib way. But, for his faults, you could never accuse him of lacking integrity. Even in these moments, you can hear him ready to take a pin to his his own ballooning sense of self importance. It’s his sense of humour, as much as his sincerity and self awareness, that ultimately brings him back to Earth.

Better, and more abundant, are the moments of understatement and nuance. ‘Bagsy, Not in the Net’ is, as the title suggests, about a reluctance to do something difficult but necessary for the greater good. Here the lyrics present glimpses of anxiety in action. ‘Try it. Don’t like it. Leaving you here is the thing that I fear so I fight it.’ Similarly, ‘Then Because She Goes’ uses painterly abstractions to convey love’s young blush. ‘You are mine. I’ve been drowning in you. You fracture light again. Beautiful. Please don’t cry. I love you.’ The vocals are processed and flooded below thick guitar strokes which just adds to the sense of sinking. Best of all is ‘Playing on my Mind’ which bridges the gap to the stream of consciousness style of ‘Roadkill’ and ‘The Birthday Party’ with poetic restraint and concision. ‘I won’t buy clothes online cause I get worried about the fit / but that rule don’t apply concerning my relationships…oh these things they have been playing on my mind.’ ‘Too Shy’ (already the band’s biggest and best hit to date) carries this theme through to one end point; a distressed protagonist hunting down free wi-fi late at night so that he can have cyber sex with ‘the girl of your dreams’. It’s funny, it’s smart and it’s irresistible pop music.

I understand why some people call this The 1975’s White Album but that comparison doesn’t really stand up to close scrutiny. For a start, The Beatles and George Martin meticulously sequenced The White Album so that although it was a diverse assortment of styles and moods it never felt anywhere near as jarring as ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’ does. Here the grotty punk of ‘People’ grinds against an actual orchestral interlude, which in turn gives way to an early 00’s UKG homage. There are no smooth transitions. It’s deliberately destabilising. Even more startlingly, the most frequent and disorientating clashes happen within the first half hour. Momentum is frequently and consciously repressed. Other than the aforementioned ‘People’, the album’s opening 20 minutes contain nothing of much forward velocity. ‘Frail State of Mind’, the weakest of the early singles, skips along on a fractured loop and sleepy melody. The Birthday Party has a similarly lollaping rhythm and is full of meandering guitar noodles, causal background chatter and a vocal track that almost seems to tumble out of Matty Healy of its own slinky volition. Amidst the above two tracks is ANOTHER ambient, orchestral interlude. And yet this opening section coheres so much better than it has any right to, building towards an absolutely triumphant middle third. Of course It’s discordant but that feels like the correct setting for ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’.

The album is loud and assertive; at times I wonder if It spreads itself too much, almost obnoxiously, like a city banker on a crowded tube. But in general, I’m enthralled at the audacity and bowled over by the band’s ability to pull it off time and time again. Only a handful of acts have ever had the ambition to attempt anything this wide reaching. But a little much is sometimes made of their stylistic sprawl anyway – this isn’t genre tourism; the band always bend sounds and styles into their own image, whether it’s garage, dancehall, emo, ambient or folk. It still ultimately sounds like The 1975. Anyway, you won’t venture for too long without tripping over a bright DX7 synth or a pin sharp guitar lick. For all their evolution they still retain that essence of the desperately precocious, 80s indebted guitar pop band that first released ‘Sex’. On this occasion they skew back to that sound most explicitly on the hopelessly nostalgic ‘Guys’, an endearing ode to friendship formed and sustained over two decades. On the back cover of the album, the four of them appear, in black and white, backs to a wall, propped up alongside one another. It’s a moving image to accompany a moving record. ‘Guys’ builds to to a climax where Matty repeats over and over ‘you guys are the best thing that ever happened to me.’ After listening to ‘Notes on a Conditional form’, you see exactly why he says that.

9.5/10

Review Roundup

Any evolution in Jason Isbell’s music has happened incrementally. Over the last two decades, initially occupying the George Harrison role of third string songwriter in Drive By Truckers and since 2007 as a solo artist, Isbell has developed a reputation for consistency and reliability. His has been the definition of a slow rise to success, accelerated slightly by his contribution to the ‘A Star is Born’ soundtrack. ‘Reunions’, his seventh album, is as assured as you would expect. He remains one of the finest at the craft of songwriting. Not a word here is misplaced. There’s no set up without a pay off. No emotion that feels phoned in. He spies the low hanging fruit and looks past it. Whether writing about sobriety, separation, grief or nostalgia (the main themes of ‘Reunions’) he always finds unexpected vantage points from which to untangle and prise open. Highlight ‘Oversees’ conveys an emigre’s anguish from the perspective of the family left behind. ‘St. Peter’s Autograph’ presents a husband’s reassurances and support for a partner mourning the loss of a friend. These songs are spare, careful, empathetic. His band, The 400 Unit, accompany him, steady as a rock but delivering some more nuanced textures and evocative soundscapes than on his previous, more linear records. In that regard, ‘Reunions’ might be the most inventive album Jason Isbell has put out, as well as the most incisive and understated.

8/10

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At times in the past, Soccer Mommy’s music has been laidback to a fault. Guarded, intimate, relaxed – her songs were comfy to the point of being unremarkable; like dad jeans given voice. But ‘Colour Theory’ elevates Soccor Mommy without diverting from those central principles. It’s simply better. The melodies are brighter and more ambitious. The arrangements now have both the depth and clarity that was lacking on the debut ‘Clean’. Sophia Allison matches the candour and vulnerability that has always grounded her songwriting with the experience and sophistication that comes from touring the world twice over. As a consequence, ‘Colour Theory’ is knowing and dynamic. Songs like ‘Bloodstream’ and ‘Circle the Drain’ could be 90s Alt-Rock hits resuscitated from an MTV 2 netherworld. Despite the assortment of infectious melodies, crayon coloured riffs and sticky choruses, this is still a dark record, largely about the day to day realities of living with depression and illness. Allison depicts painterly images of childhood on opening track ‘Bloodstream’ before starkly contrasting that innocence with a description of self harm and trauma. ‘A river runs red from my knuckles into the sink and there’s a pale girl staring through the mirror at me.’ In contrast to the bluntness of her lyrics, her singing is sleepy, and the music slacks. It’s pretty but it doesn’t try to be. In the vary next verse she’s evoking ‘hydrangeas blooming off park trees.’ The complicated contrast (one of many) is one of the reasons her writing is so compelling. ‘Colour Theory’ offers no easy answers, just beautifully phrased questions and resonant uncertainty.

8/10

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‘And It’s Still Alright’ was written and recorded in the wake of producer Richard Swift’s death. Swift, a longtime collaborator and confidant of Nathanial Rattelif, clearly made an impact on those he worked with and ‘Its Still Alright’ bears some hallmarks of his production, even in absentia. This is a mournful, moving collection of songs that gravitate around loss without ever being swept away by it. Ratteliff has recorded a curious, if not adventurous, collection of folk-rock songs that skew from hard wrought melancholia to light footed delicacy in a heartbeat. It’s admittedly patchy – heart tugging songs of sincerity like ‘Rush On’, ‘You Need Me’ and the title track contend with the more whimsical, and sometimes plain illusive, likes of ‘What a Drag’ and ‘All or Nothing.’ But in its finest moments there is real wisdom and comfort; melodies and words that feel naturally entwined and as ancient as the trees on the album’s cover. There’s little doubt Swift would be proud.

7/10

Car Seat Headrest ‘Making a Door Less Open’ – Review

Back in 2014, the same year they signed to Matador, Car seat Headrest released ‘How to Leave Town’ on Bandcamp. A diversion from their normal form of indie rock, ‘How to Leave Town’ included the fourteen minute synth oddessy ‘the Ending of Dramamine’ and the spoken word ‘Is This Dust Really From the Titanic?’ That they branded ‘How to Leave Town’ an e.p, despite it clocking in at an hour, spoke to the band’s ambition and their audacity. This particular achievement faded somewhat into obscurity however, when only a few months later Headrest released their debut major label album ‘Teens of Style’. New album ‘Making a Door Less Open’ is a callback to ‘How to Leave Town’, in the respect that it returns to a largely synth driven, electronic sound. But in most ways the album – the band’s first release of original material in four years following 2018’s ‘Twin Fantasy’ (a collection of rerecorded bandcamp demos) – lacks so much of what made that, and the group’s other recent albums, so great.

Will Toledo is a writer in whom several traditions converge; both a Matador slacker in the lineage of Stephen Malkmus and a product of the 21st Century Blogosphere, he manages to embody both traditional and experimental values. You see both sides of him on display here. These songs are as taut as any he’s produced. The production is clean and dynamic, and the arrangements are rarely as combustible as in the past, for better or worse. When it all comes together, as on ‘Weightlifters’, ‘Deadlines’ and ‘Martyn’, the band sound absolutely primed to headline the festivals they’ve been slowly climbing the bills at. These highlights may be modest in comparison to past glories but their charms are not insubstantial.

Although still prompted by imagination and an instinct for the wonderfully ridiculous, Will Toledo envisaged ‘Making a Door Less Open’ as a direct collection of songs rather than a unified, extended statement. This doesn’t particularly play to his natural strengths. You can usually work out what these songs are about, and where they are going, within the first 30 seconds or so. That is a striking development when you consider how unpredictable his writing has been in the past. He has shaved off unnecessary musical and lyrical excess, in an effort to hone in on something more instantly gratifying. The extent to which you think he has been successful will largely depend on how much stock you placed on his old way of working. It certainly doesn’t seem to pay off on lead single ‘Can’t Cool Me Down’, a dull and clunky track most notable for an awkward falsetto and the amateurish programming.

The next song is ‘Deadlines (Hostile)’, which, despite being the catchiest track on the album, is also at the heart of what’s frustrating about it. The song is largely about the pressures of getting an album written and put out. It’s descriptions of writer’s block are insightful and poetic (‘got a canvas as white as the moon but when I see it at night, it’s a sickening blue’) but when depicting the business side of the bargain (‘now I’ve got another question – if we run out of time can we make an exception for the piece that needs completion?’) it becomes crunchingly self aware and tedious. The song appears in two forms on the album; the electric rock version and later as a barely recognisable beat and siren driven rendition. There is a third version that appears exclusively on the vinyl in a kind of dubby, melted down mode, and a fourth, acoustic version that appears as the CD bonus track. They each have different lyrics and musical arrangements. It’s far, far too much of a good thing.

There is something cloying about this and the other pretences we are expected to endure; the fact Will Toledo is conducting interviews in a gas mask (an affectation that’s even more unwelcome considering the current pandemic) or that he’s labelling the album a collaboration with his alter-ego ‘Trait’. it’s more than a bit trying and pretentious. Even the running time (47 minutes) feels like a conceit to prick Headrest’s tradition of grandiosity. As a consequence of all this artifice, the album feels laboured despite its brevity; so even a straightforward song like ‘Hollywood’, with its silly refrain and d.u.m.b riff, feels more like an exercise in form rather than something impulsive and spontaneous. ‘Making a Door Less Open’ is self-consciously a sharp left turn but in moments like this it can’t help feeling like a strained, and largely superficial one.

Perhaps Car Seat Headrest are a victim of their own success. They have after all made three of the best indie-rock records of recent memory – ‘Teens of Style’, ‘Teens of Denial’ and ‘Twin Fantasy’. These albums felt like important statement albums to be ranked alongside ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’, ‘Channel Orange’ and ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ in the canon of courageous, sprawling, inventive auteur records of the 2010’s. In comparison ‘Making a Door Less Open’ feels slight and insubstantial; a sparodiclly exciting but mostly frustrating experiment that doesn’t really work. An album lacking the hooks, the surprises, the tempo shifts, the unexpected chord changes and the odd tonal juxtapositions of those older albums. Everything about ‘Making a Door Less Open’ feels more linear and predictable.

It begs the question – who is this for? The blaring riff at the centre of the aforementioned ‘Hollywood’ swings for the bleachers but the song seems to mock the very people who might find enjoyment in it. With its sticky but condescending lyrics and a refrain of ‘Hollywood makes me wanna puke’, Toledo makes the rather *duh* point that the general public is complicit in commercial America’s hold over us. He has all the conviction of a fired up undergrad without any nuance or empathy. At least that song is catchy; elsewhere things get legitimately ugly. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting enjoyment from ‘Hymn’ where Toledo’s chopped up, out of tune warbling collides with a chintzy drum machine and irritating synth buzzes. I have similar feelings about the sounds Toledo uses on ‘Can’t Cool Me Down’, Deadlines (Thoughtful)’, and ‘Famous’. The smudged notes, sketchy arrangements and cheap aesthetic choices render ‘Making the Door Less Open’ a genuinely unpleasant experience at points.

Inevitably though, when one of your favourite artists makes a new album, good or bad, there are things to savour, and reminders of why Will Toledo is often considered to be the finest indie songwriter of his generation. I can hear what he’s trying to achieve and understand that conflict within him – the ambition to play against his pre-existing strengths and explore new and exciting impulses. The ambition to make something more accessible and universal perhaps. Surely an album as lacking in refinement as this wasn’t an attempt at commercial success? On ‘Deadlines (Thoughtful)’ he says ‘I am not so shallow. I am not that deep’. And maybe that’s the ultimate problem. Despite his ambitions, ‘Making a Door Less Open’ is not the direct, accessible ‘collection of songs’ that Will Toledo set out to make. Nor is it a particularly meaningful or moving album in his traditional mode. It’s peculiar, it’s obtuse, it’s interesting, it’s ameturish. It’s ok. But, like Toledo says, It’s not shallow and it’s not deep – and the middle ground is no place for Car Seat Headrest.

6/10