In a recent interview with NME, Breton frontman Roman Rappak claimed that the London four-piece is "not out to make a big political statement." His declaration is hardly provocative until you learn that Breton's HQ-- functioning as studio, home, squat, party venue-- is a disused bank in south London. You may recall a few news items about occupying banks over the past year. The borough in which these filmmakers-turned-musicians work is within scanty distance of Brixton, one of the epicenters of last summer's riots. It's one underground stop away from the converted bank that Aphex Twin's Richard James reportedly calls home in Elephant and Castle. From the roof of their building, you can apparently see the dilapidated, brutalist Heygate Estate; once considered a housing ideal, it's now mostly abandoned and awaiting destruction.
These social and cultural associations are a little too potent to tally with the fact that Breton named themselves after the Surrealist pioneer André Breton, who believed in the idea of unadulterated, organic thought. However, if their aesthetic is very neatly and surreptitiously codified, Other People's Problems-- note that ambiguously apolitical and/or accusatory title-- is a significantly more hodgepodge affair that cherry-picks influences from the surrounding area like a gentrification tourist.
Nearly 10 years ago, Bloc Party released their first song as part of a compilation by Angular Records, a label run from New Cross, which is just a few miles from Breton's HQ. Bloc Party have since gone on to symbolize the kind of generic, unexciting British indie band from which Breton pain to distinguish themselves, yet the frenetic high-hats and tremulous mope of a song like "Wood and Plastic" do little to abet that aim. On "Edward the Confessor", their dated clubby aggression calls to mind Brixton's Basement Jaxx; following that is "2 Years", whose delicate hummingbird wing synths and pitch shifted vocal aptly demonstrate what might happen if Christopher Nolan asked James Blake to soundtrack a mawkish moment for Batman. By the end of the record, there's little but a mildly Aphex-ish electronic glitch to distinguish them from a band like the Maccabees.
It's perhaps unfair to introduce Breton's music by way of comparison, as they do have plenty of their own ideas. Sadly, they're not well executed. The band appealed to German composer Hauschka to record brass and strings for the record, which he sent back for Breton to chop up and use at will. Unfortunately, his parts have largely been used with as much grace as a child smashing up a priceless vase and turning the pieces into a mosaic of a Transformer. Stripped of natural eloquence, what you imagine was once a violin swoop becomes a sampled, aggressive stab on opener "Pacemaker"; the stuttering piano sample on "Electrician" sounds as if it's repeatedly throwing itself against a brick wall. Both come off like bad hip-hop beats. These classical elements are at odds with the messy, meaningless field recordings that litter the record, whose first half-- before it smoothes into an increasingly bland paste-- is characterized by a violent, backpacker beat that comes on like a drunk getting up in your face just for the sake of provocation.
There are what appear to be occasionally poetic but often frustratingly blank references in Breton's lyrics to the London riots and the death knell of the coalition government. Opener "Pacemaker" has Rappak yelping, "When the end of a sigh comes announced with a brick/ Would it help us decide or run to the cell," a comparatively eloquent summation of the frustration and poverty that boiled over into violence last August, and the mis-targeted, scared recriminations that followed. The overdriven, static-drowned tone in his vocal makes it sound is if he recorded it on a mobile phone, another potent motif considering the DIY footage that populated 24-hour news feeds during the riots, and a stylization picked up on "Edward the Confessor". As "2 Years" seemingly harks back to the general election of May 2010, "Governing Correctly" bitterly thanks someone for providing the mistakes from which to learn. It's one of the most interesting songs on the record, the band chanting dispassionately whilst a naked, bruxing bass groove rubs up against mewling synths-- that is, until an absurdly bombastic club grind drowns any sense of dynamic, an acidic Skrillex-lite womp that also kills the end of "Ghost Note".
Perhaps not in the way that he had intentioned, Rappak's line about the band's lack of grand political statements turns out to be true. Final song "The Commission" comes in with the sound of smashing glass muted to a glimmer, another hesitant, mournful James Blake-like moment where Rappak mumbles sadly, "You're forced to act," as if resenting current society's prompting them to become politicized. Their aesthetic is so meticulous, they may as well have painstakingly tattooed "GRIT" and "PAIN" onto their knuckles with a rusty fountain pen found in a cupboard at the bank, but beyond that, whatever Other People's Problems is trying to say is lost beneath the fact that it's so sonically muddled and abrasive, and lyrically imprecise. Is their pebble-dashed sound documenting the urban decay and social degradation of the city, commenting or criticizing? Or are they just pillaging and riffling through their surrounding influences with little fixed idea of their eventual goal? For now, it feels more like the latter.
