There are some interesting ideas on the first proper single from Brighton three-piece Elle Milano, but the opener and title track “Meanwhile In Hollywood” sees to be the runt of the litter.
Musically, Elle Milano are coming from that “genreless genre” direction, taking a kitchen-sink approach to their songwriting. There’s jangly indie-hipster guitars, for example, but they’re deployed in angular patterns and surprising song-structures that owe more to the post-hardcore scene than the louche Camden lotharios.
“Meanwhile In Hollywood” itself takes on vapid consumerism and celebrity culture – which is all well and good, but it’s not only an easy target but a pockmarked and overused one. No matter how amphetamine-fast and sarcastically it gets delivered, “we’re all impressed by your brand new multi-story car-park and state-of-the-art shopping mall” still sounds a little childish – all the more so because we already feel that way. Come on, Elle Milano - tell us something we don’t know.
The visceral and brilliantly titled “Ringtone Advertising Director” has a bigger punch to it. There’s some energetic punk-folk guitar under the wide-eyed mania of the vocals, some New-Wavey synths, a surprise breakdown in the middle … it’s also much more genuinely scathing than “Meanwhile In Hollywood” while covering similar conceptual territory, and feels much less forced and false. Why wasn’t it the title track?
Closer “Showroom Furniture” is an angsty po-mo ballad of grating guitar and wrenched vocals, and my favourite of the three by miles - full of muted frustration, loneliness and not-so-veiled references to drugs and decaying relationships, here Elle Milano really manage to capture the vacuum of futility that is your mid-twenties:
“I stole my accent from magazines I read / and write these things about all the things you said / I’m not growing my hair for the sake of it / I’m doing it for you … I’ll give you packaged misery”
Singer Adam Crisp sounds much more convincing in this mode than his art-college faux-punk thing – so much so that it could almost be an entirely different Elle Milano to the one that wrote “Meanwhile In Hollywood”.
Maybe that’s deliberate - the whole Elle Milano package (even that seductively glossy-mag moniker) seems pitched as a deconstruction of music-as-predictable-product and band-as-brand, but it’s a trifle self-defeating – a look at the queue of your local emo show will demonstrate that non-conformity is just another thing to conform to.
But it’s a genuine attempt at novelty that seems heartfelt, and if that alone sets Elle Milano some distance from the smug chart champions of contemporary indie. I think they’ll struggle to escape the world they depict in “Meanwhile In Hollywood” by living in Brighton, though – but at least it’ll give them more things to write about.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Elle Milano, indie, Meanwhile In Hollywood, post-punk
