Know how you can tell when a band is really excited about its new album? When the selling point of their tour is that they're going to be playing all of an album they made 21 years ago. That may be a slightly unfair assertion, but the Wedding Present are asking for it: their tour for Valentina is being billed as the shows at which they'll recapitulate 1991's Seamonsters in its entirety, "along with 40 minutes of other music."
Seamonsters was a hard slap of an album, indie pop curdled into abrasion and dissonance, with lyrics whose barbed wit seemed like singer/guitarist David Gedge's dam to hold back much more hurtful words. That version of the Wedding Present, though-- Gedge, guitarist Peter Solowka, bassist Keith Gregory, and drummer Simon Smith-- is a distant memory. Gedge has been the only point of continuity with that lineup for the past 15 years, and meanwhile the rest of the band has turned over multiple times, not to mention the seven-year span during which Gedge's main project was the soundtrack-obsessed group Cinerama.
Valentina is essentially Gedge and his current sidemen doing a very solid impression of the Wedding Present as they were circa 1990. His lyrics are still focused on infidelity and emotional unfairness, although his characters are a lot more willing to accept culpability than they were back when he was writing songs with titles like "Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?" "The Girl from the DDR", the catchiest thing here, is a sour/sweet inversion of cross-cultural love-duet clichés: Gedge admits "I've been using you all this time... I've realized that I don't think I'm ever gonna leave my girlfriend for you," while the band's new bassist Pepe le Moko chirps sad little phrases in German. In "Back a Bit... Stop", Gedge even backs out of "the liaison we're exploring," citing "your lovely fiancé."
It's not clear what the current lineup of the Wedding Present would sound like left to their own devices, or if they just naturally approximate the bash and swing of the old incarnation as closely as they do. The fuzzy snarl of le Moko's bass sounds just like Gregory's; Charles Layton plays frantic drum rolls just like Smith's; and if Gedge and Graeme Ramsay's guitar parts don't crash into each other quite as enthusiastically as Gedge and Solowka's did, they come pretty close: The trebly flicker-and-rub riff that introduces "You Jane" is this band doing what it does best.
There are two aspects of the early Wedding Present, though, whose absence from Valentina is particularly regrettable. One was their engagement with the world of music outside themselves--their songs often felt like witty ripostes to everything else they were listening to. (The Weddoes covered Pavement's "Box Elder" when Pavement had one self-released EP to their name; they recorded multiple John Peel sessions' worth of Ukrainian folk tunes; their first singles compilation was called Tommy, of all things.) Valentina suggests that the only thing they've been listening to lately is their own discography.
The other thing missing on Valentina is the sense that they were perpetually charging forward, and maybe even trying to escape from themselves. The first 10 years' worth of Wedding Present recordings were one formal advance after another; when Gedge turned his attentions to Cinerama, that seemed like another exploratory shift, a way of making sure he wouldn't have to keep rehashing the aesthetics of his youth forever or keep singing like every failed romance was the end of the world. Going back to the old name with a new band, though, was a disappointing retrenchment, and spending a yearlong tour relying on the "playing the old album" gimmick means that either the Wedding Present don't trust these new songs or they don't trust their fans. It's strange to ask this question about a band this forceful, but why are they being so timid now?
