This rock band, Mew: They might not be “cool.” I mean, they’re Danish, and they’re pretty, and they wear natty blazers and scarves, and they play great music, all of which is pretty cool. But if you see them perform, there will come a point when Bo Madsen is playing metal-style power chords, while the long-haired 1970s-prog keyboard player unleashes his “epic” wash settings, and singer Jonas Bjerre soars up into his sappiest, most atmospheric register, and you’ll notice that they’re good with hair gel and look like soap stars, and it’ll all come clear. These guys are not “cool”-- these guys are like Queensryche. Queensryche meets Sigur Rós, but still.
And maybe that’s the pinnacle of style in Denmark (what do I know), but over here it’s uncool, and that uncoolness is part of what makes And the Glass-Handed Kites, now released in the U.S., one of the better rock records of the year. The band’s reference points are normal enough in the indie world-- Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine-- but the ambitions they draw out of them are not: These are some of the only guys around who still believe in hard-rock Valhalla, the kind of lavish, stratospheric, fairy-tale prog that’s less about making aging boys geek out and more about making young girls swoon. Who else does this-- would Stars ever rock out like this? Even a grandiose pop band like Coldplay wants to act down-to-earth, and here are these guys with their dreamy thunderstorm pop.
The payoff, of course, is that they really are nearly as magnificent as they’re hoping to be. For one thing, they’re not actually throwbacks, and their rock is cutting-edge elegant: Madsen’s rhythm guitar scratches through odd chord voicings like Radiohead, his lead lines match the dreamy buzz of any shoegazer act, and the keyboard and piano lead both through epic builds and breakdowns with only the slightest winks at “cheesy”; on first listen, they sound more like a better-funded Swirlies than a laser-light show. These grand songs-- the whole record is technically one continuous piece, but whatever-- are complicated in a way that’s theirs: Bjerre’s doe-eyed vocal melodies come in strange, lilting figures, and the band switches through tricky half-measures, endless changeups, and sly, slick rhythms to wrap around them.
This stuff might even be considered “difficult,” if it didn’t always come back to the starry-eyed soaring. Like “The Zookeeper’s Boy”, which acts like it might be a great knotty rock song for approximately 30 muscular seconds. Then the keyboards start sparkling, and then Bjerre teases you with the most unapologetically glorious chorus here-- a heart-clutching, soaring-through-clouds, upper-register plaint: “Are you/ My lady, are you.” All 53 minutes are packed full of ideas like that, often to the point of over-egging things: oceanic dream-pop on “Chinaberry Tree”, interstellar hard rock on “Apocalypso” (seriously: how prog is that?), or geologically huge melodies on “Saviours of Jazz Ballet” (which sounds like Yes album covers look). They have song titles like “The Seething Rain Weeps for You” and lyrics about girls with “meringue-colored hair.”
It’s a terrific accomplishment, and it’s tempting to imagine one reason why-- that these guys are playing not out of fashion, but out of pure belief. What’s stranger is to imagine how this fashion-bucking record could pull fans from so many different classes of listener: arty cloud-buster for Coldplay fans, sensitive hard-rock opus for Guitar Center techies and Dream Theater devotees, a masterpiece for people who haven’t smoked weed yet but are thinking about it, Bambi-faced European dreamers to match the unicorn poster on the wall. For our readers-- at a time when indie rock is enamored of scratchy post-punk minimalism, and even a grand-ambition pop act like Bloc Party pretends to be bristly-- this could be the escape of the year, a curve off into the lush, ambitious stargazing that used to happen all the time. No matter which direction listeners come from on this one, they’ll find the same thing: If you’re up for that fairy-tale rock glory, these guys have it down.
