We like Rock Music

If you haven’t yet given a listen to the quirky but stirring sound of England’s British Sea Power, this is the time to start. Following the jittery post-punk of 2003’s The Decline of British Sea Power and the chillier, spacier (and somewhat less crowd-pleasing) style of its 2005 follow-up Open Season, British Sea Power has swung for the fences with Do You Like Rock Music?, an album that aims for “epic” – both in terms of its instrumentation and its invocation of grand historical narrative.
Imagine U2 with lyrics written by The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy. The riffs on most of the tracks are huge. The percussion? For most tracks: thundering. And British Sea Power offers up shameless chant-along choruses from the album’s opening (“We’re all in it, and we’re / All in it, and we’re / All in it, and we close our eyes”).
But something funny happened on the way to stadium rock. Whereas the genre is known for lyrics with broad appeal – something U2 and Bruce Springsteen, at their best, do very well - British Sea Power addresses the history of artificial illumination (“Lights Out For Darker Skies”), World War II drama (“No Lucifer”), mass migrations from Eastern to Western Europe (“Waving Flags”), bird flu and the 1953 flooding of Southern England’s Canvey Island (“Canvey Island”) and the splitting of the atom (“Atom”).
In other words, if you only like songs about love, partying and driving an automobile, you’re going to be disappointed. If, however, you’re a bit of a history geek and/or appreciate evocative images, you should be very pleased.
The only weakness with Do You Like Rock Music? is that it gets a bit soggy toward the end. Following track after track of massive anthems, the mild final songs “No Need To Cry,” “Open The Door” and “We Close Our Eyes” feel a bit anticlimactic. None are bad, really – but it seems like an undertaking on the scale of Do You Like Rock Music? should end with a bang rather than a whimper.
Still, killer songs, historical trivia, bird flu – what more could you ask of a rock album? Check it out.