It’s a daring thing to leave your best song off the album. I mean, can you imagine The Beatles leaving Penny Lane off Sergeant Pepper? Oh, hang on, they did. But The Beatles were fecund geniuses while angular puzzle rock types Spring Offensive are merely a very good band. Still, they’ve left their signature tune ‘A Let Down’ off the record, which shows spirit, if not judgement.
The truth is that when Spring Offensive are good, they are very good indeed, but not all of the cuts on this short album make the grade, and ‘A Let Down’ would have increased the hit to miss ratio. Still, no apologies need be made for opener ‘I Found Myself Smiling’, a piece of charged domestic drama rendered terrifying by Lucas Whitworth’s malevolent, sardonic drawl. The band generates a tense, spare pulse before opening up into one of their patented mass choral passages, as the protagonist drowns in a sea of hatred and contempt. Every moment is thrilling.
The following ‘Abacus Rex’ is, to coin a phrase, a bit of a let-down. As its name suggests, there is a strong element of math rock in its studied angularity, and this aspect makes it sound as dated as some of Youthmovies’ more esoteric efforts. The element of psychological drama that made ‘A Let Down’ and ‘Smiling’ so compelling is missing; the lyrics suggest that Lucas is struggling with his homework.
‘Every Coin’ is a brilliant idea badly realised. In this one, the victim of a mugging is forced to swallow the contents of his own wallet. As a metaphor for the viciousness of modern capitalism, it can hardly be bettered, but it’s almost as if Whitworth has become intoxicated with the cleverness of the concept, as the song itself is literally painful to listen to, whether it’s the swedging, oafish drum solos, or the details of the victim’s ordeal, which border on torture-porn. Apologists may say that Spring Offensive are being deliberately provocative, challenging the assumptions of a complacent society, but we are in this for the music and ‘Every Coin’ is a polemic, not a song. Fans of Catherine Breillat or Eli Roth may be keen, but it’s not for me.
At the centre of the record is the excellent ‘Cable Routine’ which I’ve praised elsewhere, before the band moves into early Radiohead territory with the pretty and amusing ‘Everything Other than This’. The lyrics are a bit uneven: the pathos of ‘we crawl off the stage…empty handshakes, the loss of our friends’, vies for supremacy with the schoolboy humour of ‘now we all know why the clocks have just stopped/ the hands aren’t moving ‘cos the battery is f****d’. Still, the music, imbued with a sort of stoic melancholy, is often very beautiful.
Spring Offensive remain on course to win many friends and fans in the coming months, and the faults on this album are mostly due to an over-abundance of ideas and intelligence, rather than a lack. Sometimes their ingenuity tips over into an over-fussy glitchiness, but when they get it right, as on ‘I Found Myself Smiling’, you get the impression that you are listening to champions. The Offensive proceeds apace.