If this is indeed the conditional form that The 1975 look to take, perhaps they should meet the conditions required to making good music. Their latest release, Notes on a Conditional Form is a miserable, expressionless husk of an album. If they were attempting to encapsulate the mood of the world in a mere eighty minutes, then they’ve certainly succeeded.
Healy’s shortcomings as a human being match the failures of his band’s music. Revitalising the new wave melodies by trailing out an album that has all the appeal of nailing your ears shut. The musical equivalent of a vicious disease, a terminal encounter with the sound and style of The 1975 provides near lethal results. Notes on a Conditional Form is, for the most part, a step in the right direction when compared to their debut. Half an hour extra of filler is contained on this bleak, meandering album, one that would serve more use as a coaster than as a CD.
Political relevance and awareness for the sake of it. Name dropping plights of humanity, without the confidence or interest necessary to sap meaning from these encounters with faux political activism. The opening, self-titled track opens on a speech extract from Greta Thunberg. Why that is is beyond me, especially since the band don’t have anything else to say, nor do they reiterate the environmentalist stance anywhere else in the song themselves. A song for people that are politically aware but actively inept, I’d struggle to call the first track of the album a song. A fair few fans are going crazy for this song, showcasing and highlighting it as representing how aware the band are of relevant issues. I suppose Matt Healy is aware of so many issues, that he often piggybacks them to promote his dreary singles, like he did with the recent Black Lives Matter protests on Twitter.
People reminds me of a poor man’s Evanescence. Banging on about the same umbrella of topics that the band feel comfortable in discussing at a surface level. Girls, drugs, sex and food, we never go beyond that, and Matt Healy’s cosplay as Marilyn Manson with a throat disease doesn’t make for an interesting music video, nor does it make for engaging sound. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of filler and dreck to shift through. 22 songs worth, and I’d say a good half of it is used to bulk up the album into something far bigger than it should be. Usually B-Sides are the hidden, lowkey releases, not the core of the album. But, in their quest to reinvent sound and music itself, they’ve thought that every track they wrote around the two-year period of making this album is good enough to scramble together on their latest album.
Coupling the sound and the various music videos together for a moment, it’s interesting to see how much the band wants to rehash from other music videos. It all becomes rather clear in Frail State of Mind, a blend of Ratatat’s homemade visuals and Talking Heads’ unique imagery, moments that have nothing to do with the song. Nothing in Frail State of Mind expresses anything interesting though, and there’s such a disconnect between the crooning of Healy and the vaguely acceptable drumbeat. Not a single redeeming song on the album, perhaps the best of all is The End (Music for Cars), and that’s only because for two minutes and thirty-six seconds, I don’t have to hear Healy sing.
Sometimes I tap my desk vaguely in time to the beat of a song I’d half-heard. Me slapping away at my desk has more musical talent and integrity than anything The 1975 can hope to aspire to, the gutless, indie-wannabe druids, providing shallow rock pop and cliché electronic pop soundbites for people with pretend problems. By the very definition of a very loose term, this is music. But applying this loose term to any abstract idea paves the way for opportune moments. The 1975 have guitars, that makes them musicians. I’ve been on a plane, that makes me a pilot.
Discover more from Cult Following
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
