The first single to be released from Everything Everything's second album, Arc, kicks off with a finger-wag at the deadening effect of extreme consumerism: "Sold your liver, but you still feel in the red/ Sold my feelings now I'm hanging by a thread." The sentiment might seem a bit rich coming from a band whose debut album, Man Alive, ricocheted between advertising hoarding-style proclamations like a rubberized pinball bouncing off Flubberized bumpers: If song titles like "MY KZ, YR BF", "Qwerty Finger", and "Photoshop Handsome" weren't a strong enough allusion to brief attention spans, then the agitated, yelpy hairpin nature of the material implied that, true to their name, Everything Everything were not men of singular focus.
Probably as many people hated them for it as became slavishly, delightedly addicted. If you could look past Jonathan Higgs' extreme garrulousness, Man Alive's equally distracted and distracting exterior contained much scathing humor (and heartbreak) about the absurdity of modern media overload, and our disrespect for the planet. "Chest pumped elegantly elephantine/ southern hemisphere by Calvin Klein," Higgs sang with weary wit on "Photoshop Handsome". But laughing at society forever is a hiding to becoming a low-tier Vice stringer, and lyrically, Arc realizes that, beneath those low-fat muffins that promise to change your life for five minutes, there's hell in that hand-basket.
The album name inadvertently nods to a biblical story about salvation; there's anything but on Arc, where Higgs repeatedly envisages apocalyptic situations both as payback for human irresponsibility, and out of a surprisingly binary desire to stand at the end of time and weigh up whether we did more bad than good. The beasts that populate his Bosch-like landscape are privileged guilt, apathy, generational despair, the inability to communicate, foiled aspiration, and broken homes, though they're rendered with less crash, bang, and wallop than you might expect-- touring with Muse recently didn't make EE go full conspiratorial prog lizard king, thank god.
The flat-out ridiculousness of Man Alive's most exhilarating material is gone, and in its place a mixture of perfectly concise, moving, visceral, often funny pop singles, perhaps one too many mid-paced laments, and a couple of rounds of roiling tirades. Some welcome breathing space unites the strands; songs stick within a genre at a time, and Higgs' lyrics no longer need Infinite Jest-style footnotes to decode them. If the subject matter sounds like Thom Yorke's dinner table patter, at least it's tempered by plenty of musical larks: the percussive glottal stops and exclamations of "Cough Cough" are a funny, theatrical jibe at half-assed activism, "Armourland" is testament to anyone who's ever claimed Max Tundra's mashed vocal glitch is ripe for pop transformation, coupled with the most gorgeous, warm rush of a chorus EE have ever written: "I wanna take you home/ And find some new joy in this autopilot life." And Higgs' sense of cadence and consonance is strong as ever, backed up by the band's campy, musical theater backing vocals: "So fast, hence take an arrow from your quiver or we're/ Past tense-- what's a trilobite to anyone?" he sings on the stuttering "Kemosabe", underpinned by Jeremy Pritchard's rude funk bass.
Everything Everything's reputation for abject maximalism overlooks their unexpected ability to craft relatively tender, sad songs; the handful on Man Alive were as delicate but dark as the coiled rainbow on oil's surface. There are similarly unconventional, small-scale ballads on Arc, the best of which is "Torso of the Week", whose nervous, mournful verses about the literal and figurative grind of the treadmill eventually burst into a Roman candle of a chorus. "The House is Dust" is an atmospheric tale of divorce made ominous by Michael Spearman's cavernous drums; centerpiece "Arc" is seemingly a structural homage to OK Computer's "Fitter Happier", and the best employ of the luscious, Hans Zimmer-y strings that showboat throughout the record. But violins will play sad for any old chump, and beyond the silliness and spark present on Arc, there's a braveness more profound than sticking Beyoncé, Arvo Part, and Mr. Bungle on your influences list and calling it mammy.
It doesn't take an analyst to deduce that the former knottiness of Higgs' lyrics might have been a smokescreen for some ineffable feeling-- for all the words, he didn't often admit to much. Throughout Arc, he's repeatedly crueler to himself than any critic could have been about Man Alive, and sinks beneath the dulled specter of male depression. The juddering, Dustin Wong-like shimmer of "Choice Mountain" veils him pondering reincarnation rather than submit to hopelessness; the fraught "Feet for Hands" (which opens with the only truly unpleasant sound on the record, a misplaced mandolin intro) asks, "When you think of me, don't remember this/ Not a slow wane of a blinded man," and the sublime "Radiant" counters guitarist Alex Robertshaw's piercing, heart-pounding release with the mournful admission, "I could make a difference, but I don't."
Their general sense of drama and vulnerability couched within a pretty masculine idiom-- guitar rock, to be reductive-- brings to mind the way Queen duped a nation into pounding a masculine chest with a feminine fist. The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card. "Don't try to hide it! ... 'Cos it'll have you in the end," Higgs sings in a strong head voice on the final song, the itchy, choral anthem, "Don't Try". He should know; Arc is a brilliant lesson in not letting your neuroses become you.
