The Music were never going to be a good band. Ever since they decided that dumbshit alpha and omega name was going to stick and titled their first EP You Might as Well Try to Fuck Me, they were dead set on greatness, even if it was the kind of greatness that meant "big or immense, used in the pejorative sense." Funny part is, due to the 2007 maelstrom of blog-house/nu-rave/what-have-yous, someone might look back at these guys-- basically Kasabian with less interesting interviews-- and think they were onto something with heaters like "Take the Long Road and Walk It" and "Breakin'"? Whatever claim to prescience they had was forfeited, however, when they slinked back into classic rock riffery with producer Brendan O'Brien on 2004's Welcome to the North. But the truth is, they're more of a risible band than a bad one, suffering critical barbs usually reserved for the unlistenable. Call it incremental progress if you need to, but Strength in Numbers is far from unlistenable-- I don't know if your free time is spent sorting through stacks and stacks of charmless indie rock CDs that have the nerve to call themselves "pop," but when the chorus of the title track hits with the subtlety of a latter-day Nas album title, it's damn refreshing to hear a group bound for glory as shamelessly as the Music.
But as the saying goes, those who are good with hammers see nothing but nails, and despite recruiting Orbital's Paul Hartnoll to slim them down to a slithery club-rock hybrid, Strength in Numbers is more like a musical montage retelling the legendary Slam Dunk Contest performance of Chris "Birdman" Andersen-- it's all in good fun when you tank a tomahawk throwdown the first two or three tries, but 10 times of screwing up the same exact way...? Whatever surface differences exist between this and anything else the band's done in the past, it's still Music music-- one-word titles that could pass for "American Gladiator" names ("Spike", "Drugs", "Fire"), Adam Nutter running his guitar through the past three decades of pedal technology, and the same wallop of sound greeting every single hook, as if the only thing they culled from O'Brien is an admiration for Stone Temple Pilots. But hey, at least the relatively serene verses sound like "Miami Vice" incidental music, or at least the best electronica rock 1998 had to offer.
Of course, there's vocalist Robert Harvey, who previously conjured an unholy union of Richard Ashcroft's egoist shamanism with Geddy Lee's range, and to an extent, he still does. But the story behind Strength in Numbers is that Harvey spent its four-year incubation period struggling badly with addiction, getting clean, and eventually cutting off his Elijah Wood locks. In a way, the music reflects a sense of sobriety, even if Harvey still traffics in dope/guns/fucking in the street flashpoints. But it's a sobriety where "harder, better, faster, stronger" or "I can't go on, I'll go on" gets snatched off the dance floor and shouted by a spinning class instructor.
"Idle" isn't necessarily stronger than anything surrounding it, but at least it's different, relatively restrained with hard-panned acoustics, a sinuous, Elbow-like chorus, and whatever Harvey is blathering about obscured by a cloudbank of dubby reverb. But whatever thrill one can get out of glitzed-up bangers like "The Spike" is cancelled out by the sheer relentlessness-- Hartnoll's wall-banging production raises serious questions about whether human hands actually made anything on Strength in Numbers, and this is most obvious with Phil Jordan, who's saddled with riding nearly the same hi-hat swish/snare on the 2 and 4 that's been played out for almost a quarter of his 25 years.
And really, that's why the Music have fallen on deaf ears for many since the beginning in spite of their crushing volume. Awesome, they seek greatness, but that title-- they only find power in a fabricated sense of populism that feels more assumed than earned and frankly feels a bit ridiculous after 10 minutes. So yeah, I guess in 2008, those Verve comparisons really do make sense.
