New British Sea Power album uncharacteristic

Do You Like Rock Music? doesn’t answer its own question.

By Kelsey Whipple

Published Feb. 8, 2008

It was April 2005. British Sea Power, a BYOB band of offbeat Brightoners, had released a solid debut, survived a lousy follow-up and rocked South by Southwest like it was Wembley — all of this a veritable coup for a band that plays in the same ballpark as Coldplay.

They were the perfect union of outspoken and unspoken: four Brits whose onstage antics were at odds with their sweatered selves and whose vox-pop epics were at odds with pop-rock protocol. The general consensus was a sound "Yes, please."

Cut to today. British Sea Power’s third album, the colossally mistitled Do You Like Rock Music?, brings with it a changed band, a relatively benign BSP for whom years of outrageous shows and honest stadium-rock have earned it less indie cred than it deserves. A lesser band might have lost focus as well as momentum.

For better or worse, Rock Music?’s title hints at a point its songs generally miss.

Although the guys can be counted on for anthemic festival sing-a-longs, of which there are plenty, the sole track on which they get hot and bothered enough to follow up on their titular endorsement is “Atom.” Said song, an unbounded soundscape from the band’s Krankenhaus?

EP (question marks, anyone?), is, among other things, a full-on BSP anthem, marred only at its end by noise for the hell of it — what sounds like cell-phone interference and a crabby rabies victim.

It’s a distinct about-face from the first half of the album, the majority of which finds its focus in re-appropriated Arcade Fire hallmarks.

Arcade Fire’s Howard Bilerman figures heavily on the production of “All In It,” a just-add-organ page straight out of Neon Bible.

There’s all the semblance of the Canadian septet without the real thing: group-shout choruses (“No Lucifer”), eerie strings (“Waving Flags”), female backing vocals (“All in It”) and several outbreaks of the church pipes. Hints of the French chanson abound.

It’s as easy to understand what made four Brits take on the transnational wunderkinds as it is to understand why they chose to christen their album something so overtly lame, but the similarities do end.

“No Lucifer,” all breathy vocals over lyrics that read like a Scrabble board, combines the colorful whimsy from the band’s first album with the amorphous moodiness of its second in the same burst of potential that practically oozed from Krankenhaus?.

The songs on Rock Music? are often epic but rarely overdone — manageable post-punk sound bites tossed in with the occasional 4:34 instrumental. (Avoid “The Great Skua” at all costs.)

The brothers Wilkinson wield typically antiseptic vocals to cut the lyrical crap: “When something’s wrong, you know it just ain’t right” (“Lights Out for Darker Skies”) or “When it’s good, it’s not bad” (“No Need to Cry”). Confucius says: Duh.

When you press pause, it’s pretty clear what happened here: It took BSP three years to create an album that reeks of potential without really taking advantage of any of it.

One awkward title does not a rock album make.

On Rock Music? the guys set themselves up for the kind of rocking they’ve made their own onstage, only to play it safe offstage and eventually be upstaged. Do You Like Rock Music? Sure, but where is it?