Brook Shields Required?

Here's the game: 1) choose a composer 2) imagine what their most incongruously named offspring might be, eg Wayne Tchaikovsky. Playing this led me to the realisation that "Terence Trent Wagner" is the funniest group of five syllables I've ever heard.

Warning: preposterous PJ Harvey/prefix pun contained below.


SPRING OFFENSIVE – THE FIRST OF MANY DREAMS ABOUT MONSTERS

Unlike some drunken old colonels, we don’t lose any sleep over the way the word “gay” has changed its meaning. Unlike one of our old English teachers, we aren’t upset by current usage of the word “nice”. She used to get riled because the word was supposed to mean fastidious. Yeah, in the seventeenth century, when lest we forget, “healthcare” meant “being bled by your hairdresser”. In English, words mean pretty much whatever we want them to mean; unlike in France, the British government does not officially control the language (Jesus, can you imagine if it did? Three year waiting lists for the subjunctive, datasticks full of pronouns left in bars, creeping privatisation of the irregular verbs).

And yet, we still get miffed at the way “pretentious” is used. To us, it will always imply someone simply making a pretence. Therefore, in rock terms, it would be pretentious to hide your Eton accent with ersatz glottal stops whilst preaching revolutionary punk politics, and it would be pretentious to dress up in flimsy scraps of leather and prance round the stage looking like you want to fellate any passing roadie in a paddling pool of Jim Beam, when you actually prefer an early night with a mug of Horlicks, but it would not be pretentious to make a 14 minute single based on Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stage Grief Cycle.

It might be a bit bloody silly, but it wouldn’t be pretentious.

Yet, this is precisely what Spring Offensive have done, with their free download track “The First Of Many Dreams About Monsters”, and whilst it might be easy to dismiss behaviour like this as sophomoric, or needlessly ostentatious, but we feel that we can defend them. First up, there’s nothing wrong with shooting high, because you just might make it – we’re surely glad that Brian Wilson tried to make “teenage symphonies to God” and not “a couple of catchy tunes to net me some pussy” – and secondly, the conceptual elements of this song may have been useful for the band in its composition, but really we’d defy anyone in the world to work it out in a blind test. In fact, the handwritten notes that are supplied with the track conclude “we sing about the act of writing about grief”, which shows how far they are from producing Grief! The Kubler-Ross Story On Ice, although we do feel the distancing is a little meaningless, as if their intent was to present us with a concept and then immediately hide it behind layers of obfuscation (“Don’t you wish you’d never, never meta-“).

Add to this the fact that the lyrics are, as ever, wonderfully vague and allusive, having more in common with the imagistic snapshots of William Carlos Williams than your average pop song. “Beware the intruder/ I have scissors in my hand [...] He says he’s an artist” doesn’t give us enough data to construct any real picture, but does make a truly evocative yet unspecified image with a powerful economy of words...which is perhaps what all good pop songs do, after all. And it’s especially effective when delivered with a mixture of reticence and declamation by Lucas Whitworth, whose voice is sounding better than ever on this recording. There are other fantastic elements to this single, especially the guitars’ undulating shimmer in the quieter sections, the wonderful percussive loop at the start that sounds like an old typewriter being pecked at by a fledgling reporter, and the fact that the mammoth song hangs together without ever feeling stretched.

But this impressive release isn’t perfect. The seems a little too much in awe of local heroes Youth Movies in the crescendos, and we can’t help feeling that the rubbery Foals guitar lines and massed choruses are the least exciting part of Spring Offensive, even when they do them incredibly well. So, we urge everyone to download the record, it’s incredibly impressive, and hugely enjoyable, and yes, it’s a bit bloody silly, but the weird part is that Spring Offensive have released what might look like a magnum opus, a career summation, but have in fact revealed how swiftly they are outgrowing the old sound. There’s lots to get excited about here away from the obvious moments, and it could be the first glimpse of enticing new paths and alleys for the band to follow. The first of many, doubtless.