Spectreview: The 1975 – Notes on a Conditional Form

The 1975 think (and say) too much (and too little) on Notes on a Conditional Form.

-CHARTREUSE-

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“Apathy for me is an issue, you see
I just talk about the things upsetting me
And I get somewhere, I don’t like it”

Since their bewilderingly-titled second record, The 1975 have spent their time trying to fill a perceived hole in the market for music that’s unapologetically ambitious. Perhaps they have a point. Music today is largely not concerned with being ambitious; it’s more about soundtracking ambition, providing some unconscious emotional background for experiences or mediums that simply hit the brain harder. Artistic ambition – especially under the scrutiny of the populace at large – also often leads to courting division and playing defense, stances that are hard to take in the wake of late-stage capitalism. The people that choose that path do so knowing the stakes are immeasurably high, that failure is more possible than ever because failure on these terms essentially equates to being forgotten. But no one ever touched God in passivity. Love it or hate it, you have to admit it’s exciting to see a group, execution be damned, putting their all into injecting life into a genre most everyone considers to be dead.

They got close, too. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, released at the tail end of 2018, helped the English four-piece enter a new echelon of artistic respect. For a band suspected of riding trends and chasing ephemerality from the get-go, A Brief Inquiry proved to be shockingly focused and thematically sound, with enough successful forays into genres other than their signature (a sort of 80’s-themed, Auto-Tuned neo-gospel) that even skeptics began to feel comfortable following their movements. It didn’t take long for the British press, in their typical hyperbole, to started uttering phrases like “saviors of rock” and “the new Radiohead” in hushed tones. (A band like The 1975 starting to garner Radiohead comparisons indicates a dearth of ambitious pop-rock that kind of proves their point.)

Those skeptics eventually had to contend with Matty Healy, a frontman who precariously approaches tosser-ship in every interview. With a swagger that reads positively as unbridled self-assurance and negatively as narcissism, Healy, likely intentionally, recalls the self-conscious rock stars of the 80’s (the Bonos and the George Michaels) enough to pique the interest of purists, even if what he’s selling is only incidentally similar to the arena-filling riffs of those past icons. If he aims to represent a scatterbrained, ever-connected generation, it comes across most evidently in the way he speaks and speaks and doesn’t stop speaking, throwing out opinions and intentions and little asides without a ton in the way of follow-through. Stage persona or not, cannily-unfiltered or not, his confidence attracts legions of fans who relate deeply to the way his brain works.

Ironically, that tendency is the main reason why Notes on a Conditional Form is a step backward for the band. Their long-awaited, long-delayed fifth record may be sonically similar to its predecessor, but it bears almost none of its focus and even less of its cohesive power. Instead of a tight collection of stellar songs (a feat that would have been possible given the wealth of strong material here) The 1975 instead opted to choose quantity over quality, stuffing twenty-two tracks recorded in over fifteen studios into an eighty minute package that, in its entirety, will completely satisfy almost nobody.

While A Brief Inquiry stunned in its tasteful genre-hopping, Notes is comparatively hodgepodge and unbalanced. It’s not just the schizophrenia of its pieces, although that in itself is a problem. It’s that there’s too much redundant material, and the record isn’t sequenced properly enough to bear its weight. Notes opens with a sobering five-minute monologue by climate activist Greta Thunberg which leads to an incongruently explosive rock number, and that’s the most forceful the band gets with seventy minutes left to go. From there, it’s an uneven listen made even more frustrating by the inclination to make comparisons both within and outside its scope. Styles that are introduced on the record, like the slinky Burial-aping electronica of “Yeah I Know” or the cloying acoustic folk of “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America,” often share a sonic sibling later on that robs these songs of their unique power. Some tracks compare unfavorably with fresher tracks from previous records (“Frail State of Mind’s” retread of A Brief Inquiry’s “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME,” for example). Others, mostly the instrumentals, are enjoyable individually but take up too much space. Cumulatively it diminishes the effect of including so many genres, and that makes songs that are completely new ground for the band, like that explosive rock number (“People”) or the Manchester sleep sound of “Shiny Collarbone” (led by Cutty Ranks) stick out too far.

Cognitive dissonance, arguably the record’s biggest issue, abounds here largely because of the band’s inability to edit. A kitchen-sink mentality works in the right circumstances – it only worked on the White Album, for instance, because it was novel – but it almost never works when presented in a conceptual package, as it is here. Healy can claim as much as he wants about how the record’s title signifies nothing, or about the “zero fucks perspective” that led to its creation, but when you open your record with nearly ten minutes of alarm pounding, you implicitly goad people to read into your music. See, a lot of Notes is still about something, whether it’s the enmity between sexuality and faith (“Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America”), the terrifying mundanity of atrophied social interactions (“The Birthday Party”), or simply the crippling anxiety of living in a doomed world (“People”). Most of the sentiments of these songs feel undercooked already, but Healy’s intentional stakes-lowering neuters the power of these songs even further. If you squint really hard, you might be able to make out a connecting line in how this scattershot approach mirrors the paradoxical combination of extremity and uncertainty that defines today’s youth, but that interpretation isn’t guaranteed. Most likely, Healy and drummer George Daniel simply wrote a whole bunch of songs and didn’t want to leave any off the record, which is absolutely fine, but it doesn’t demand the tsunami of words accompanying each track that Healy provided to several individual sources.

If there is any evident theme around which these songs orbit, it seems to be Healy himself. Roughly half of Notes’ 22 tracks illustrate his experiences, which run the gamut from relatable (“Frail State of Mind”) to confessional (“Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied”) to anecdotal (“Roadkill”) to deeply personal (“Don’t Worry” and “Guys”, which just happen to close the album). There’s nothing wrong at all with speaking about what you know, which is really all that any of us are qualified to do. Unless you care about the guy (and Healy himself doesn’t make that case terribly well), it makes for a strange pairing with the other half of the record, which is decidedly more socially-conscious. It’s one more muddled message amid too many muddled messages, and it causes a compound effect of disingenuousness that spoils the moments that are meant to be unashamedly earnest. In this way, the titanic power of Thunberg’s opening monologue becomes discouragingly out-of-place, as does that wonderfully heartfelt duet between Healy and his father on “Don’t Worry” or the equally-tender curtain call of “Guys”. Each of these tracks, and others, would make that much more of an impact on an album that respected their roles; instead, they feel peculiarly like artifacts of an early blueprint for the record, one where the band perhaps didn’t run out of ideas or decide to let go of that conceptual ambition.

It’s almost a cruel joke, because Notes works best if you turn your brain off and simply enjoy its moment-to-moment pleasures. Structure notwithstanding, Notes contains several songs that, if nothing else, match the band’s best material. Those songs, not coincidentally, are difficult to tie back to some aspirational concept and therefore enjoyable purely on the merits of their sonics. They also happen to be moments where the entire band seems to be on the same wavelength, like the carefree Britpop of “Me & You Together Song” and the new-wave pastiche of “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know).”  George Daniel remains the instrumental backbone of the band, his sweeping, maximalist signature filling in the cracks of the arrangements and importing a crucial lushness to even the sleeker tracks. Unfortunately his instrumentals aren’t given the gravitas they need due to that bloat, but there are still flashes of brilliance across the more substantive tracks. The strings on “Bagsy Not In Net” add a poignancy that keeps that song from being yet another rippled kick-snare workout; “Having No Head,” once you get past the unnecessarily long build-up, boasts a killer beat. Outside artists, like Phoebe Bridgers and FKA twigs, find their way into the band’s canon for the first time, although their inclusions range in efficacy. twigs’ vocal samples, for example, are absolutely wasted on the tepid dancehall of “What Should I Say”; Bridgers, meanwhile, does exactly what she does best on “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America,” even if her lyrics don’t mitigate the cheesiness of Healy’s verse.

Overall, Notes on a Conditional Form bears great moments that occasionally settle into dynamite songs, but its bloat, and the mixed messaging, make it less than the sum of its parts. The 1975 may openly revel in ambition, and ambition today should absolutely be celebrated, but Notes belies a certain flavor of mania that comes with capitulating to heightened expectations. Being “the next best thing” during a time when so many other bands have saddled that mantle (and fallen just as fast) is its own gigantic stressor, and this record, along with its sprawling marketing strategy and convoluted gestation, indicates how that anxiety wormed its way into its construction.

Despite some tentative words about this potentially being Kid A to A Brief Inquiry’s OK Computer, those Radiohead comparisons aren’t really apt anymore (if they ever were). Barring the differences in socioeconomic status, The 1975 equate more to Oasis, a band that found enormous success on the power of self-belief. In that sense, Notes on a Conditional Form is essentially their Be Here Now: a record produced under heightened scrutiny that sinks under the weight of its excess. It says too much but also doesn’t say anything; it includes too much but doesn’t do enough with what it has; it wears its ambition on its sleeves but doesn’t do the legwork to follow through. Above all, it inspires too many words to be spilled about a band of cis white guys performing spirited yet intellectually-questionable pastiches of decades-old music in 2020.

Recommended, but not as an album.