No-one would have believed, in the last years of the twentieth century, that ornate, theatrical pop music would ever be seen again. Whilst Travis was paving the featureless yellow path that led to Coldplay’s ubiquity, the ears of the scene were either tuned to dour, po-faced post-rock expanses in the form of Mogwai and Godspeed or the mumbled introspection of Low and The Tindersticks. And yet, some survived who believed in the power of drama, who revelled in the communicative possibilities of façade and pretence, who felt that musical invention was better shown by intricate, intelligent orchestration than by the portentous length of tracks (or their titles). And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.
Whilst cabaret pop hasn’t precisely taken over the world, Borderville’s gloriously over-reaching debut album seems a perfect zeitgeist Polaroid, a record so theatrical it should come with a glossy programme and an unfeasibly overpriced ice cream. And it’s an incredible piece of work, welding Bowie’s cracked actor dramatics to off-Broadway torch songs, with crescendos direct from Queen’s halcyon days. Joe Swarbrick may not have the most agile – or even tuneful – voice in town, but he may well have the most expressive, alternating between stage whisper and Christ-pose rock howl to wring every ounce of emotion from elaborate rock opera opuses. The wonderful “Short Sharp Shock” is a prime example, capturing the whiff of deflated expectations as a band packs up after a show, offsetting some emotive, barely pitched yelps with massed Original Cast Recording backing vocals. Everything about this surprisingly varied LP is overdone to a T, and Borderville have clearly realised that, whilst sincerity and chest-bashing might do the trick, emotions can be far more powerfully expressed if we all realise they’re artificial. The mask is always more frightening once you know it’s a mask.
The rest of the band is also superb, dealing in the wild dynamic variations that can only be achieved with sensitively controlled ensemble playing. Keyboard player “Woody” Woodhouse deserves especial praise for his improbably fluent runs across the ivories, the synth whoops of live favourite “Glambulance”, the tipsy stumbling solo of “Lover, I’m Finally Through” and the jerky mazurka of “Short Sharp Shock” particularly standing out. What’s most impressive about the record is how much variation the band achieves with a relatively sparse sonic palette: it would have been all too easy to drench everything in swooning strings and ersatz effects, but Borderville have retained the sound of a simple rock quartet and pushed it into some intriguing places
No matter how unfair we find it, most of the world considers every damn person in Oxford to be a limp-wristed, pretentious, teddy-clutching silver spoon sucker, honking away about Byron and ponies. A review of Winnebago Deal some years ago in the NME said something like, “What are you lot so grumpy about? Was your 15th century quad not properly manicured this morning?” Yes, even the whiskey-soaked death-grunge hollers of two hairy creatures from darkest Eynsham brought forth plummy images from Uncle Monty’s most rose-tinted recollections. We feel that, if this is how the world sees us, we should embrace it. We’ve already given the world the preppy Bowdlerised art-funk of Foals and Stornoway’s warm-jumpered folk poetry, let’s complete the picture with Borderville’s greasepainted bombast. Cherish them.