The Designer’s Drugs

Medium: Album
Stimulus: The Indelicates – Songs for Swinging Lovers
Anno: 2010

What’s neatest about the newest release from British band The Indelicates is how it offers a wide spectrum of piano and guitar rock and doesn’t linger on any one point for long. When one listens to the opening salvo of piano bombast and Julia Indelicate’s bawdy cabaret wails in “Europe,” the expectations for the rest of the album would typically be that it will be of the Dresden Dolls breed of burlesque. Yet the next track forward wipes that stereotype right off the listener’s face with a fast paced 80’s style rock song called “Your Money,” sung by Simon Indelicate. In fact, Simon ends up doing the majority of the singing on Songs for Swinging Lovers – which is the problem.

A new word came to me in the course of listening to Simon’s wistful yet glaringly exultant crooning: Triumphangst. What I’m using this word in this instance to describe is a singer’s tendency to create a contrived and clichéd posture of transcending despair in order to make his or her song more dramatic and anthemic. Though the album’s lyricism can be quite sharp, Simon Indelicate’s vocals are full of Triumphangst, in both what he sings about and the throbbing tone in which he sings it. It doesn’t sink the album by any means, but I found myself thinking that Julia Indelicate – who occasionally slips into warbling herself – should have taken a more active role in the singing.

Yet even if the vocals are at times flawed, the music wraps up the words and gives the album its allure. The sparkly piano rock of “We Love You, Tania” and “Flesh” are counterbalanced by darker ivory sensibilities on the subdued “Roses” and the roguish “Be Afraid of Your Parents,” which features Simon Indelicate in his finest form. “Ill” and “Savages” are bright and upbeat guitar songs, the work of the latter bearing strong similarities to Bloc Party’s prettier tracks. The album’s big swerve comes in the rambling country tune “Sympathy for the Devil,” which plays out surprisingly well.

While I’m not a fan of some of the singing found within, Songs for Swinging Lovers is in total a full, diverse, and captivating album. The music always keeps its head in the right place, even when the mouths fly off their handles.