Producer Dave Fridmann has built his name on highly successful, invigorating experiments in pop classicism which revel in the same swooning orchestration that rock music all but abandoned after the 1970s. But it seems every year, he's got another up his sleeve, never much different than the last, and with repeated exposure to these kinds of grandiose epics, the newness has worn off, leaving many of his productions to join their cousins Wilco and Elliott Smith in a genre I describe as, well, indie adult-contemporary.
Don't take offense yet-- I think indie adult-contemporary is a fine idea, and I've loved far too many of these records to get snobby about it. It's just a fact: This is the music that may eventually prompt your preteen kids to roll their eyes and make unenthusiastic noises when you force them to listen during long car trips. Jeff Tweedy may become your Sting, Wayne Coyne your Peter Gabriel, Mercury Rev your Steely Dan-- and there's no reason any of this will be any less wonderful than the Carole King LPs in your parents basements. But at some point, I realized my shelves were filling up with this stuff, and even though I knew I'd find every new release of it perfectly lovely, it seemed more rewarding to look into something else.
I mention this not to pick on anyone's favorite albums, but because the great flaw in my personal No More Indie Adult-Contemporary plan turned out to be The Delgados. The Delgados' secret weapon, from their early noise-pop days to their big breakthrough with The Great Eastern, has always been a peculiarly Scottish penchant for resigned, anthemic melodies: Suffice it to say that if "Auld Lang Syne" had not existed, this band probably would have written it and then made it kick, hard. The tracks on The Great Eastern started off with either Alun Woodward or Emma Pollock doing gorgeous mumbly sing-songs, but most of them quickly burst open to the two of them singing in big, wistful, drunken mug-waving unison. Better yet, that was the album's focus, with the swoony schmaltz-experiments Fridmann usually abets providing only the thinnest layer of icing.
And I mention all of that to say this: It's a testament to the general greatness of The Delgados that I'm as captivated as I am by Hate, despite its suffering under the weight of a much more prevalent layer of faux-classicism-- by which I mean loads of gratuitous pokes at the "swoon" button. It also leans a bit obviously into those slow-building anthems, which you can take either as a glorious celebration of the band's strengths or a sort of grating repetition: Here's the one that starts with just piano then builds to a big stormy climax, and here's the one that starts with just guitar and builds to a big stormy climax, and so on. All of which winds up being beside the point, because Hate is a different thing. Hate is a spiteful, disappointed, hoping-to-be-hopeful record, wherein even the most Delgados-by-numbers builds run up not into glowing chants but into desperate, wounded crooning. And then they do it again, and again, but each time, there's something about the big beating heart underneath that makes those hooks sink in, and deep.
Of course, the biggest successes here are the moments when the band still surprises you, and most stunning is "Coming in from the Cold", which drops the epic orchestration in favor of a detour through the pop-anthem territory where you'd usually find Travis or Coldplay. The differences, in this case, are that (a) this song contains a hook I can't imagine anyone not falling for, and that (b) Emma, who gets to deliver it, does a great job of supporting my argument that she's one of the best and most affecting vocalists going. The other big surprise comes in the form of a deeply cynical Beatles pastiche-- on "All You Need is Hate", which starts out sprightly like "She's Leaving Home" and then launches into a fascinating Delgados version of the Beatles' R&B; strut. Following that is "The Child Killers"-- I told you this was wounded and bleak-- one of the least hopeful piano ballads you're likely to hear this side of Rufus Wainwright.
Do some of the more standard-issue runs seem a bit labored? They do: "Never Look at the Sun" has a climax that sounds great but never really catches; "Coalman" fails to compensate for its pointlessly over-orchestrated interludes, even with its closing Stereolab impersonation; "All Rise" is just a vague variation on The Great Eastern's "Aye Today". But the emotion buzzing out of these songs keeps a great number of them stunning, like indie-friendly versions of scores from period epics or superhero movies: "If This is a Plan" starts off like the mellow end of OK Computer and then erupts into a string-drenched gale so stirring that even Alun's two-ton melody has to claw its way in, and "The Drowning Years" aspires to Creed-like levels of bombast and actually succeeds.
And that's the redeeming attribute of Hate, the extra-musical one: Some great dramatic reckoning of hope and despair is going on between its lines, and that's what's important. I could write a thousand more words on how disappointed I am with The Delgados for verging on making Just Another Indie Adult-Contemporary Record, but hey-- if more people in that genre were making music that seemed to be grasping at emotions as important as this, I might not have sworn off of it in the first place.
