Declan McKenna – What Happened to the Beach? Review

What indeed? Erosion, most likely. The sea spills over to claim the sandy dunes and to later be picked at by a metal detector-wielding Declan McKenna. He has come a long way since Brazil though the core group of his audience would like you to think otherwise. What Happened to the Beach? is a confident new turn as the former pop-oriented artist hopes to capture the bright colours and fashionable sense of the indie scene, an ever-evolving arena which has already churned up and spat out McKenna once before. Here he returns with ample new tools and a few new singles to help him on his way. Opener Wobble is as its title suggests, a wobble of wilder sounds and distorted acoustics. Messy, but mysterious and a range of cobbled-together sounds which McKenna is hopeful of maintaining.  

It does grow, rather nicely too once the messy production and slapped-together instrumentals of What Happened to the Beach? is overcome. McKenna sounds like an early cut of an even earlier single from The Beatles. Studio chatter and crackly pieces on I Write The News are not just a reinvention but a disastrous thump which has warbling electronic manipulation like the title theme from Luigi’s Mansion. McKenna has seen where Zeros took his career and hopes to head in a trippy direction, far away from the popular turn of his career so far. It works, though presents McKenna as an artist without aim. All he knows is to move away from the indie pop and electronics of his previous works, finding no common pace or ground to provide his vocal work to. McKenna hijacks the visual appeal of an indie movement to peddle some secondary school music room experimentation with Breath of Light.  

Any compliment to be paid to the bits which can be picked out from this electronic manipulation, the shaky hands of poor mixing and throwing in instruments with no real idea of where to place them, are brought back to Earth with the heavy thump and feedback which can be heard throughout. Plodding numbers like Honest Test which scrabble for some footing on the post-AM Arctic Monkeys playing field. Pairing those tones with the still pop-oriented tribulations is a clear case of having your cake and eating it. An occasionally funky bassline is not enough to salvage the distorted hopelessness within. 

Congratulate innovation but the too-easy run of an artist claiming to reinvent themselves under the guise of messy and tonally absent stylings has run its course. This sounds as though McKenna is having a midlife crisis. His circus act on Symphony and the singles he released for this piece were a mere masquerade. What Happened to the Beach? sounds more like the files were corrupted on upload. McKenna hopes to hold on to the twee upbeat spontaneity of summer feelings all the while reinventing himself as a moody and mysterious artist who wields tech as a weapon against the summer spectacles. Loud, boisterous and surprisingly cold at times, this is an artist so desperate to reinvent his image that he loses grip on whatever he had hoped to carve out as his niche next. Forget the beach, what happened in the recording studio?