Delphic emerged from
the BBC's recent poll of tastemakers as the nation's most hotly
tipped new indie band, but in 2010, in the UK, this is not such
a great accolade. It's a sign of the post-Britpop times that in
the final tipsheet the band actually finished third, trailing
behind a couple of arty female pop acts (think this year's
version of Florence, or Little Boots). While 2009 was a golden
year for U.S. indie, in the UK it was the moment the term
"landfill indie" went mainstream, denoting the domestic glut of
torpid, timid, generically retrogressive guitar bands. The
post-Strokes tide that kept British indie afloat through the
00s, from Franz Ferdinand to the Libertines to the Arctic
Monkeys, has finally gone out, leaving a clueless generation of
charmless groups high and dry.
Delphic are being
heralded as a way out of this dismal situation. They're wired
and sequenced for the dancefloor, as opposed to plodding and
strummed for the student moshpit; suited and booted rather than
dowdy in denim; stylishly poised rather than scuffling and
shambolic. On the face of it they represent a break from recent
orthodoxy; in truth, it's hardly a novel approach. In recent
months Snow Patrol returned averring that there'd always been a
dance element to their music, while Editors attempted to update
their reference points all the way from 1980 to 1982 with the
addition of a few studiously vintage synthesizers.
In fact, if Editors
had shown real commitment, persuaded their singer to take one
for the team, and recruited the drummer's girlfriend on
keyboards, they would doubtless sound an awful lot like
Acolyte. To have reached the third paragraph of a
Delphic review without mentioning New Order is practically a
feat of self-discipline, but it can be avoided no longer.
Delphic, let's be clear, are a rather brazen yet
undistinguished attempt to reconstruct and exploit the
trappings of Factory Manchester circa 1985.
The funny thing is,
the odd crackling guitar line and synthpad chord change apart,
they actually don't sound very much like New Order. All three
Delphicians did national service in the landfill trenches, and
at their worst, on tracks like the opening "Clarion Call" and
"This Momentary" you can still hear the lumbering basslines and
prosaic piano chords of some sub-Coldplay sketch, like old
wallpaper under a cheap lick of paint. At their best, the
spangled guitar and chattering sequencers are more likely to
put you in mind of the fleeting beauty of "Perfume" by
Madchester also-rans Paris Angels, or even late 80s rave-pop
chancers the Beloved.
Though the band
protest that Factory comparisons are unwanted but inevitable
for any Manchester group attempting to marry rock dynamics with
dance technology, that they are far too young to remember the
Hacienda and are more influenced by German minimal techno, they
desperately invite the comparison. Titles like "Halcyon",
"Ephemera", and "Submission" are simply gagging to be
expensively set in sepulchral type by Peter Saville. It's like
they've audaciously claimed the rights to the Factory
franchise, like one of those authors who's commissioned to
write the new James Bond novel or Gone With the Wind
sequel. And inescapably the comparison, once raised, does them
no favors. Though both groups are fronted, on the face of it,
by poor singers reciting vapid lyrics, you're left pondering
once again the strange alchemy by which Barney Sumner was so
often so lazily transcendent. And as any busker who's bashed
out "Bizarre Love Triangle" will tell you, New Order's
melodies-- which you'll search for in vain on Acolyte--
are indestructibly lovely.
To be fair,
Acolyte is never less than stylish: dusted with powder,
brushed and polished to a fine gleam, as shiny but generic as a
new car. Producer Ewan Pearson has constructed a shimmering,
relentless soundworld and a couple of tracks-- "Doubt" and
"Counterpoint"-- attain an urgent, anxious euphoria. It's just
that it feels so characterless and anonymous.
Maybe in the end,
Delphic are as authentic an expression of modern-day Manchester
as Joy Division were of the city in their own time. It was one
of the more dubious claims of Tony Wilson, after all, that
Factory remade the city in its own image, that the Hacienda,
once built, was a premonition and inspiration for the 21st
century city of steel and glass. The British urbanist Owen
Hatherley has written of how modern Mancunian speculators these
days actively trade on the legacy of Factory, of how old
industrial warehouses had been transformed into "cramped
speculative blocks marketed as 'luxury flats' or 'stunning
developments' with an attenuated, vaguely Scandinavian
aesthetic." He adopted the term "pseudomodernism" to describe
this capitalist appropriation of modernism as spectacle or
logo, divorced from any social or political ideal. It's a term
that might serve just as well to describe Delphic, or indeed a
great deal of British music today, vainly trading on the
modernist impulse of their 80s forebears. "Pseumo Pop," then:
it's no landfill indie, but for now it will have to do.
Thom
Yorke
atements on my behalf," he declared. "I would also
like to stress that I have no association with accountants
appointed by Front Line, namely London
& Co."
