12/30/2023 0 Comments Pac man fever synth![]() It’s not the kind of thing you listen to for emotional comfort, per se, but the intoxicating way that they put all of the beats and riffs and layered vocals together certainly makes it go down easier. The backdrop of recent world events – most notably Brexit and the trend toward nationalism in European and American politics in recent years – appears to inform a number of their songs, though many of them are just abstractly stated enough that you could imagine them to be about any number of urgent issues. What immediately stands out as I dive into Everything Everything’s individual songs – catchy as most of them may be – is that they maintain an uneasy balance between catharsis and confrontation. Their fourth album, A Fever Dream, was released this summer, and it hasn’t taken very long at all for it to become one of the most-played and most-enjoyed 2017 releases in my iTunes library. Everything Everything just happens to pull their set of influences together in a more immediately engaging and intriguing way than I’ve heard from any of the other bands I’ve mentioned. ![]() These bands all probably share some common influences from the earlier days of indie rock, Britpop, and soul music. And the strong, at times almost overbearing falsetto vocals of lead singer Jonathan Higgs bear passing resemblance to Dougy Mandagi from The Temper Trap, an Australian transplant to the UK whose records I’ve enjoyed to varying degrees. (Have people tried to give me more of a heads up on these kinds of bands, and I’ve just been really dense about it? Who knows.) However, due to the way these guys work R&B influences into their music, I also hear pretty strong reminders of TV on the Radio, an American band I’ve followed for a few albums now but never fully fallen in love with. Listening to them in their current incarnation, I hear a fair amount of similarities to another Manchester-based band, Doves, who also had a bit of a rhythmic/dance background underpinning their brand of indie rock, and who I didn’t get into until they were on album #4. Somehow they’ve managed to get four albums under their belt before showing up on my radar – I guess you could blame some of that on them being from across the pond, but it’s not like physical distance has much of an effect on which bands I hear about in a day and age where I can stream pretty much anything at a moment’s notice. They’re the kind of band that has pretty immediate appeal for me – an indie/art rock outfit with a strong focus on rhythm and some insanely catchy riffs and choruses. I’m kind of bummed that I hadn’t heard of the band Everything Everything until this year. ![]() In Brief: With relentless, hypnotic rhythms, hypnotic guitar and synth melodies that sear into your brain, and politically-charged lyrics, Everything Everything has, well, just about everything I’ve been hoping to get out of an indie rock record in the year 2017.
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