Acres Of Dead Space Cadets is the début album from Brighton-based indie outsiders Elle Milano, and it’s very much an album of the Zeitgeist – a mirror in which we can see the credit crunch and the ballooning vapidity of celebrity culture distorting our faces like a funhouse mirror.
Elle Milano are a contradiction, however. Like all artists fuelled by distaste for the mainstream, they are somewhat doomed to be be parasitic upon it. Furthermore, their rebellion against shallow indie pop conceals a subconscious pop sensibility; unwittingly or otherwise, Elle Milano are trying to have their cake and eat it.
But at least they can conceive of there actually being a cake, if you’ll forgive an overextension of the metaphor. Elle Milano’s music breathes youthful life into all the styles and tropes that the NME bands have long since beaten into a flat pulp; Acres Of Dead Space Cadets is an album by a band who really care about what they’re doing for its own sake. Music for the love of music … what a novel concept!
And so we kick off with the knees-up piano, jagged riffs and lampooned aspiration of “Laughing All The Way To The Plank”, and run with the ball into and through recent single “Meanwhile in Hollywood …”, a smorgasbord of kitchen-sink post-punk-funk-folk that’s impossible to categorise from one bar to the next.
The lyrical sentiment is snipped syllabus from Celebrity Credit Monoculture Sucks 101, but they’ve squeezed more honesty into two songs than a lot of bands seem to shoehorn into a winklepicker-shaped career. Elle Milano may be a trifle naïve, but they’re naïve with conviction.
Which is an endearing trait; it arouses my affection for self-styled underdogs, and even the overblown kookiness of the vocal delivery fails to completely put me off the rest of Acres Of Dead Space Cadets. But as we advance through the album, something strange starts to occur – Elle Milano slowly but steadily mutate into a pop band.
And it’s in the songs that most decry the obvious and the accessible that this transmogrification occurs. “I don’t believe a word of what I just wrote” sneers Adam Crisp in “Curiosity Killed The Popstar”, but after its opening cacophony the song has all the bouncy cunning of a number by Squeeze.
“Katsuki & The Stilettoed Stranger” has a more familiar shape and weight; it’s that whole working-class rock thing given a hint of backspin. But it’s one of the most memorable and enjoyable tracks on Acres Of Dead Space Cadets because it sounds like they just decided to have fun doing it.
It’s much less studied, less strained … likewise “I Know It’s Good But I’m Playing It Down” and “Wonderfully Wonderful (All The Time)” document Elle Milano revelling in their gloriously mangled pop madness without feeling the need to crank the drama-school pretension up to eleven. Well, apart from in the titles, but hey.
To judge by their lyrics Elle Milano are savagely opposed to being accessible, fashionable and so forth. But that’s a subconscious schizoid mask for a band who, if they’d just let themselves go and stop worrying about defining themselves as outsiders for a moment, could beat the vanilla indie-pop pretenders hands down - not by being more “authentic” or “credible”, but simply by being good.
Acres Of Dead Space Cadets is promisingly obtuse, and marks Elle Milano as being well worth keeping an ear out for; when they stop obsessing about standing out from the pack, they’ll stand out from the pack a lot more effectively. I wish I heard more début albums this brave.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Acres Of Dead Space Cadets, Elle Milano, indie, post-punk
