Metronomy's public face has always been a front. Those beautiful bandmates in matching slacks, frolicking in a Michel Gondry video? They rarely appear on the records, which are solely the creations of Devonshire synth obsessive Joe Mount. Their—or, his—fifth album strips away any lingering pretense that this is a band deal. There are no cutesy press shots, and there will be no tour. It’s just Mount, reflecting on the hard-partying summer when his second album Nights Out positioned him on the vanguard of a wave of mostly now-defunct British electro bands. Apparently, it’s the record he's wanted to make for years, but ever-increasing levels of opportunity meant that he kept putting it off in favor of more opulent confections: 2011’s The English Riviera, an understated yacht-rocking record that recast his seaside hometown as a continental pleasure ground, followed by 2014’s analog Love Letters, where some striking singles bobbed among a weak stew of Motown and psych.
Mount cuts one of the most contrary figures in British indie, always pulling back at the moment when he could strike hot. “There’s still the potential to go mainstream coupled with the fact that we probably won’t,” he said recently, which seemed more like a comment on his unwillingness to do so than the basic implausibility of Metronomy unseating Drake from Number 1. The English Riviera was written to assuage Mount's fears that people thought they were “just a ‘modern band’, that anyone could make that kind of music.” The “willfully backward” Love Letters refused to uphold its predecessor's gilded choruses, and Summer 08 mostly eschews traditional songwriting conventions altogether. Instead it harks back to the juddering squelch of Nights Out, using post-acid house synths and rinky-dink drum machines to bridge the alt-pop DNA of Peter Gabriel’s II with classic dance cuts like Adamski’s “Killer.” Mount pens a love letter to his drum machine on the“Buffalo Stance”-indebted “16 Beat,” and he gets Beastie Boys’ turntablist Mix Master Mike in to scratch on “Old Skool,” whose chattering refrain echoes the Shamen’s “Move Any Mountain” and the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.” Mount strips the fervor from these sounds, inflecting them with frenetic cool.
“Old Skool” in particular outlines Mount’s suspicion of prevailing trends. “Have a party/In the West End/Make some money/Make more money,” he sneers, reliving his jealous antipathy towards his cooler West London peers back in 2008. It fits *Summer 08’*s insular scheme, where Mount pulls away from convention once again, but pushes his voice to the center despite the fact that he's not a natural ringleader. Miles from the odd feebleness of Love Letters, he often sounds antagonistic on the record’s first half: anguished and overcooked on “Miami Logic,” and oozing disdain on opener “Back Together,” where he impersonates a scenester girl reserving them a table “some place really, really good.” His brashness is a tonic, giving his wayward beats a purposeful attitude.
Summer 08 isn’t a people-pleasing record, but if there’s a challenger here to singles like “Heartbreaker,” “The Bay,” and “Love Letters,” it's “Hang Me Out to Dry,” a collaboration with Robyn that’s survived from The English Riviera's cutting-room floor. The Swedish pop star’s carefree demands to be used contrast Mount’s sincerity about falling in love, the tension mounting as the rubbery doppler bass lurches ever closer. It’s the most traditional pop song here, and gives way to the record's softer second half, where Mount allows some of Metronomy’s tropes to ease back in: the syncopated, clacking bass of “My House,” and spacy, Daft Punk-indebted undulating synths on “Night Owl.”
Warmth creeps in on “Love's Not an Obstacle,” but dissipates again on closer “Summer Jam,” where synths loom like cold skyscrapers in a stylized dystopia. Mount repeats a forlorn devotion (“I’d do anything for your love, love”), and the song spends its final 45 seconds in an ambient haze punctured by a rudimentary drum machine echo. It’s a strange, bittersweet note to end on; maybe the memory he’s held onto from this decadent period in his life.
It feels like a good thing that Mount didn’t make this record straight after Nights Out. Back then, it would have seemed too much like another great entry in the annals of Rock Stars Complaining About Success. And in the interim eight years, he’s figured out how to evade pop without skimping on its sensibility, and created enough of a catalogue to solidify his own idiosyncratic brand of standoffish funk. In anyone else’s hands, Summer 08 might seem strange and cold. But from Mount, as ornery as it is, it feels like a gesture of trust.
