Metronomy’s seventh album Small World takes a big step away from their electronic roots, with underwhelming results.
I’ve always considered Metronomy an electronic musical act. The band started as nothing but founding member Joseph Mount and his synthesizers, and this combination has been the foundation of every Metronomy album since. Sure, 2019’s Metronomy Forever showed off their rock chops on tracks like “Insecurity” and “Lately,” but even these included a fair amount of electronic elements.
Metronomy’s seventh album Small World takes a big step away from their electronic roots, with underwhelming results. Mount cited 90s alt-rock fare like R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” as inspiration for the album, while also disclosing he found such positive songs “irritating.” You can hear the sweetness and simplicity of this musical attitude from three decades ago on Small World, and you almost certainly won’t find it irritating. Thing is, you might not find it memorable either.
The most attention-grabbing track on Small World, and arguably its best, is the album’s centerpiece “Love Factory.” It strikes the right balance between its rock instrumentation, including one of the band’s better electric guitar solos, and a few steady notes of synthesized organ, creating a sound that is immediately recognizable as “classic Metronomy.” The song “Right on Time” is another strong contender for the album’s best, mixing the breezy 90s theme with touches of disco strings and modern electronica. It also has one of the better chorus melodies on the album, even though its lyrics are simply, “Well, you’ve caught me right on time, so for now let’s enjoy the sunshine.” The single “It’s Good to Be Back” has a lot of these same qualities, and sticks out in its own way, but doesn’t come close to these two others. It combines a synthesizer line straight out of a Hot Chip song, a punchy melody that echoes Arcade Fire’s “Everything Now,” and an overly-cheerful attitude. It was apparently written in such an upbeat manner to appeal to kids, but the contrasting lyrics of “but our love is gone, it’s our favourite song” are a bit of a head-scratcher.
The remainder of the tracks on Small World are less-electronic songs that are just kind of…there. The album opens with the piano ballad “Life and Death,” which is only intriguing for its lyrics that are both autobiographical and reflective of existential dread: “It was fun what I did, got a job, had some kids, see you in the abyss.” It then moves on to the perfectly pleasant rock song “Things Will Be Fine,” and this is right around the time I thought “wait a minute, isn’t Metronomy a synthpop band? Where are the synthesizers?” “Loneliness On the Run” takes things in a half-interesting direction with a bit of a grunge vibe, but just as things pick up with a bass solo, the song ends. The acoustic-strumming in “I Lost My Mind” leaves little impression, and even a Cure-like feature by Porridge Radio doesn’t make “Hold Me Tonight” all that compelling. By the time the mild closing track “I Have Seen Enough” ends, you’ll think “…that’s it?”—both about the song and the album.
Just as Mount decried the 90s alt-rock that served as the album’s inspiration, he recalled listening to his parents’ music during car trips, noting: “I’d think ‘this is awful,’ but there’d be one or two songs I would like…I thought it would be fun to make that kind of album.” In that same announcement, he explained the title of “It’s Good to be Back” with: “Part of me was thinking, ‘what is the lamest platitude people are going to be saying coming out of the past two years?’, but at the same time, I was thinking how it will be true and how it might feel doing things again.” These contradictory feelings of criticism and then embrace could be why this album is hard to “get,” and I wonder how much of it was devised with an air of irony. Small World is not a total blunder, but it’s not the band’s lucky number seven.
Rating: 5.5/10
You must be logged in to post a comment.