Monster Music & Movies

Reviews:

For all the UK has given the universe by way of the Greatest Rock Musicians Ever (Beatles, Stones, Sabbath, Zeppelin, Queen, Bowie, etc.) the current crop of British popsmiths (they like it when you call them "smiths") tend to overcompensate for the pseudo-intellectual pretension that dumb American rock bands so clearly lack. They've got Radiohead and Coldplay; we've got Three Doors Down and Velvet Revolver. Then again, REM are the embodiment of American ostentation, while limeys like Oasis, the Libertines, and the Darkness swill lager and pull birds as though gin blossoms and HIV haven't been invented. The point, I think, is this: The first sign that maybe BSP (who, by the way, insist on going by one name apiece, as Yan, Noble, Hamilton, Wood and Eamon, respectively)-and, by extension, Open Season-are far from the best thing(s) ever can be traced directly to the fact that REM, Lou Reed, and the kid who played Harry Potter "really, really liked" BSP's 2003 album, The Decline of British Sea Power-which, admittedly, was a hell of a lot better than this whiny collection of flaccid shoe-gazer jams that apparently washed ashore in Brighton recently. For all this talk about a "new record," BSP still sound vaguely like Joy Division and the Pixies--and a lot like Echo & The Bunnymen. But if you like that kind of stuff, you've probably already got those records.