[rating=6.00]
In a few short years, alt-J have grown from college dorm hall buddies messing around with GarageBand to full-blown rock stars working with some of music’s heavyweights. Their debut release An Awesome Wave captured Britain’s prestigious Mercury Prize in 2012, and immediately catapulted the band into larger venues and bigger headlining slots, while also hamstringing them with the tough expectations of being called the “next Radiohead.” Dabbling with comparisons is always slippery business, but fair or not, a convenient and comparable way to describe alt-J’s music to the uninitiated is to simply say they are kind of “Radiohead-y.” And, while their music does share some of Radiohead’s chirpy haphazardness and moody introspection, a closer look reveals the two to have less in common than what initial appearances and fuzzy appraisals would indicate.
For starters, it’s difficult to imagine the more turgid members of Radiohead releasing material with as much barely coded sexual innuendo as these guys have. At various points, frontman Joe Newman sings of wanting to “lick you like a crisp packet”, asks “are you a pusher or a puller?”, and equates traversing the rolling topography of dry dunes to exploring the landscape of another’s body. Even the blockbuster hit, “Left Hand Free”: that hum-along, catchy earworm of the past summer, rollicks along with nearly three minutes of naughty suggestion and double meaning. So, you can take the boys out of the dorm room, but it’s hard to take the dorm room out of the boys, it appears. You probably also wouldn’t see Thom Yorke and Co. signing off on a video that can pretty much double as a lite beer advertisement as alt-J have done with their youthfully exuberant clip for “Left Hand Free”.
Ok, so enough with the comparison game: after all, Radiohead, too, formed amongst the camaraderie of university life and resemblances can only last on the surface for so long. In terms of the product, alt-J’s music can take a while to get into and the 65 minutes’ worth on This Is All Yours will take a strong focus and determination. The aforementioned lyrical sauciness is tough to initially comprehend as Newman often mumbles through phrases or layers his words with effect. The statements may be masked and uncertain, but the sentiments leave no doubt of the band’s preference for the slow burn. These are unhurried songs that take time revealing themselves and bring forth noticeable shifts and changes with each repeated listen.
This Is All Yours’ first half offers a bit more of the band’s fabled technological tricks, with lots of instrumentation and sound effects garbled together to form frantic swirls of noise. The second half simplifies things a bit more and it’s here where alt-J’s music resonates best. The best tracks are found here -the slinky groove “Hunger of the Pine” (complete with a cameo sample from pal Miley Cyrus, which surprisingly blends in quite nicely), the charming and inspiring “Warm Foothills” and the gorgeously blissed out penultimate track, “Bloodfood, pt. 2”-gravitate more toward the plaintive side with a focus on sweet melody and perspective. They’re almost a bit folky in their arrangement and wouldn’t sound out of place performed with just an acoustic guitar and a bit of percussion (another solid track, “Pusher” essentially is performed this way). For a band that has a lot of cinematic tendencies, these late-album songs beg for inclusion on the widescreen.
One way or another, alt-J is making interesting music that demands attention. Whether you’re drawn to the swirling and intricate soundscapes, baffled by the highbrow/lowbrow duality of their songwriting, or apt to compare them to like-minded predecessors, there will be something to inspect and ruminate over. And with a high-profile tour keeping them out in front of mostly sold-out audiences, they’ll be easy to find and hear from in the near future.
