Review: The Vaccines – Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations

The Vaccines sixth album Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations is an incredibly safe return to form for the band.

 

From 2011 to 2022, it seemed as if English indie rockers the Vaccines were only getting more ambitious with time. Garage rock had always been their bread and butter, but they tried out a 70s-influenced sound on Combat Sports in 2018, and then attempted everything from spaghetti western to dance-rock on Back in Love City in 2021. Their experimentation culminated in 2022’s Planet of the Youth EP, a heavily-autotuned synthpop album.

Maybe it was the poor reception to that EP, but the Vaccines’ sixth album Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations is their least experimental album yet. It’s a solid half hour of garage rock, and basically nothing else. The album is an incredibly safe return to form for the band.

Anyone put off by the glitz of Planet of the Youth or the eccentricities of Back in Love City will breathe a sigh of relief when they hear Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations’ opening track, “Sometimes, I Swear.” Singer Justin Hayward-Young belts out its big, anthemic chorus of “sometimes, I swear, it feels like I don’t belong anywhere” over a bevy of power chords, reminding me of their earlier hit “I Always Knew.” Similarly, “Lunar Eclipse” has the fast pace of one of the standout tracks from their 2011 debut What Did You Expect from the Vaccines?, namely “If You Wanna” or “Wreckin’ Bar (Ra Ra Ra).” The track “Primitive Man” has a very simple guitar melody of just a few chords, but then pulls out a guitar solo that rivals the one on their 2012 single “Teenage Icon.” As you might gather, Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations often sounds like the Vaccines’ past efforts, but that’s to be expected when the band made their name doing garage rock so well.

Now, all of the tracks on Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations are quite good, and there’s nothing on the album that will make you think “yeah this is a swing and a miss.” That said, it also suffers from quite a bit of oversaturation. By the time “Another Nightmare” rolls around about three-quarters in, you’ve heard so many jangle pop riffs and big shout-along choruses that the tracks really start to blend together. This is a shame, since one of the things that has made the Vaccines stand out since their inception is their dexterity incorporating songs of varying tones and tempos within the same album.

There are a couple instances in which the Vaccines slightly deviate from this formulaic garage rock, only to be stymied by weak lyricism. “Discount De Kooning (Last One Standing)” has 80s retro vibes with its guitar effects and synthesizer notes, and might be the most radio-friendly track on the album thanks to its clear-cut hooks. However, despite name dropping the artist Willem De Kooning and the phrase “Machavellian” within its verses, its chorus repeats the phrase “maybe we should keep on dancing” a mind-numbing amount, rendering just a simple pop song. Likewise, the track “Sunkissed” is a little slower and more psychedelic than the others on the album, and its chorus is awash with acoustic guitar strumming and a strong synthesizer melody. It’s all smooth sailing until Hayward-Young ends the chorus with the line “we were sunkissed, sunkissed with tongues,” or alternatively “as the sun kissed, kissed us with tongues.” One of the best parts of Back in Love City was the wordplay and offbeat references it managed to squeeze into its lyrics, so Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations feels like a downgrade here.

Again, Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations is not a bad album, and I actually really enjoy songs like “Sometimes, I Swear” and “Primitive Man.” It’s just that appreciating something doesn’t necessarily mean you want to hear it ten times over. Hayward-Young even said “It’s more cohesive than most [of our] records in terms of songs, but sound as well” in advance of the album’s release. He almost certainly meant this as a point of pride, but there’s a line between cohesion and uniformity that Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations unfortunately crosses.

Rating: 6/10