It’s been hard to avoid or ignore Pendulum; they’ve been all over the alternative music media like a rash in the last six months, running up to the incredibly successful launch of second album In Silico. I could take them or leave them, as far as their music is concerned, but they’re rather interesting as a phenomenon – what has enabled them to succeed with a cross-genre hybrid where so many others have failed or struggled before?
The obvious answer (and frequently-heard party line from the talking heads on telly and radio) is that “the time is right” for the long awaited big huggy love-in between dancefloor music and the rock aesthetic. That could be true – and credit where it’s due, Pendulum’s blending of rock structure with the instrumentation of the glowstick emporiums isn’t lumpy and botched like those of many of their predecessors. But pundits and marketing men have been promising this particular alchemical marriage since before Run DMC and Aerosmith made millions with “Walk This Way” - and it’s no closer to happening now, if you ask me.
Sure, it’s currently fashionable and acceptable to be into both rock music and dance music, to go out raving one night and to a live gig the next. And that’s a good thing, too – I’m all for a bit of pluralism. The thing with In Silico, though, is that its borrowings from both sides of the divide are inherently superficial; like the cultural nomads who drift between scenes at will, Pendulum only partake of the surface of things.
For a start, I don’t care how Warners’ marketing people want to spin it – Pendulum are not a rock band. Yes, they play live, and the singer does some stadium-rousing shouty vocals here and there; yes, there’s a guitar solo in “Mutiny”, and the songs don’t follow the long smooth arcs of dancefloor music, aiming instead for padded out versions of the more radio-friendly verse-chorus-verse construction. In Silico is rock architecture built with breakbeat bricks, and is by no means as groundbreaking as it has been portrayed. If you want to hear a proper joining of rock music and hard dance percussion, step back over a decade to Pitchshifter’s career-peak record, www.pitchshifter.com – an album that balanced the two ideas so perfectly even Pitchshifter themselves have proven unable to better it since.
I repeat - In Silico is not a rock album; recent smash singles “Propane Nightmares” and “Granite” probably represent the apogee of the rock aesthetic in this selection, with the other material strung along a smooth curve toward accessibility. In fact, with their genuinely inventive and wide-ranging shoplifting of tropes – not merely from rock, but from world music, mariachi and soundtrack work – Pendulum reveal themselves to be a gifted and intelligent pop band who know the smell of the Zeitgeist when it drifts under their noses.
Nor is In Silico a drum and bass album – and to be fair, few have called it that (possibly for fear of making it unattractive to the affluent middle-class white Western market sector). Drum and bass has always been an outsider art form – very like the more extreme ends of the rock spectrum in its defiance of populism, as it happens. In both cultural wings, as previously marginal forms are reappropriated for the mainstream (which, by definition, must raid the margins for ideas or collapse in on itself) the fringes push outward in response to the land rush, exploring new extremes as a response to what is always assumed (often falsely, but not always) to be deliberate commercialisation. Drum and bass is not accessible or radio friendly; In Silico – fast sampled percussion and big sawtooth synth basslines included – is both.
I repeat - Pendulum are not a drum and bass act. You could maybe call them breakbeat or “hard dance”, but both terms are pretty nebulous, and they only hinge on Pendulum’s sound palette, not on the pictures they paint from it. Although they exist on a similar axis of approach, Pendulum are inherently less genuine a dance music outfit than The Prodigy, who fumbled and evolved their way to their eventual hybridisation (only to become trapped by it) rather than setting out to bridge the two continents from the start.
After all this time discussing what In Silico isn’t, it’s time to say what it is – it’s a decent modern pop album, and it’s a triumph of music marketing in an age when music marketing is increasingly difficult to do well. Pendulum’s primary appeal is that of novelty value; if you’re familiar with (and fond of) the canonical histories of both rock and dance music, there’s nothing on In Silico that will surprise you in any way whatsoever, at least not from a musical perspective. But to someone who has never delved deeply into subgenre scenes, or who is comparatively new to music as a “lifestyle choice”, it sounds fresh, and it sounds now – and, lest it appear I’m selling it short, it’s great at what it does. And a fresh sound sells records.
But In Silico is not great at doing what it says on the tin, as the old advert goes. It’s been fascinating to watch a carefully orchestrated campaign of blanket exposure and cultural button-pushing propel In Silico into the upper echelons of the album charts, but I wonder what effect it will have on Pendulum in the long term. Many established bands complain that they feel pigeonholed by the genres they are labelled with; early in their career, Pendulum came to attention by doing their own as-yet-undefined thing, but now they’ll find themselves burdened with two fundamentally opposing genre definitions.
It is to be hoped that Pendulum will continue doing what comes naturally to them rather than bowing to pressure to deliver a follow-up that is an even bigger success than In Silico – however, you can pretty much guarantee the bean counters at Warners won’t see it quite the same way.
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Posted in Criticism |
Tags: breakbeat, dance, electronic, genre, In Silico, marketing, Pendulum, pop, rock
