Although the songs are largely solid, there’s a recurring sense of deja vu. The album’s first half will be familiar to fans, not least because most of the songs have already been released as singles. But as the album progresses, it feels more and more like a lift-off for a great destination that the band can’t reach. In the midst of the track’s modern-day overwhelm, Healy plays the wide-eyed earnest boy, passing on his apologetic wisdom (“I’m sorry about my twenties I was learning the ropes… I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re seventeen”) and it’s genuinely moving. Lyrically it’s a mix of latter day Healy hot topics (the American Dream, QAnon, liberalism) and a defeatist update of 2018 single “Give Yourself a Try”.
An undeniably thrilling start, its centre is a minimalist, Cageian piano motif that acts as an ever-increasing magnetic pull, dragging every instrument in the studio into its orbit. The now-traditional self-titled introductory track is usually a good indicator of the band’s current aesthetic, but here it’s a red herring, at least musically. In many ways this a relief, but it does prompt wider questions about how in control (or not) the band - and particularly bandleader Matty Healy - are of their own vision, and how much they understand how it is being consumed by those outside their famously tight-knit circle. In actuality, half of the record sounds like their previous, maximalist output, and half of it sounds much more like a meta, studio-polished idea of authenticity than anything actually ‘real’ - all studio chatter and tuning strings. Announced with grave black and white imagery, the album is framed as a move from sonic opulence to a classic rock sound. And now, five albums in - just on schedule - the Return To Their Roots.Įach of these previous milestones hid a more esoteric reality behind their tropey facades, and Being Funny in a Foreign Language also barely resembles what it claims to be.
The plucky small-town beginnings, the glossy LA makeover, the heroin addiction and recovery, the state-of-the-union address, the overblown failure.
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