Last year, North London quintet the Chap released a greatest-hits album-- with the none-too-modest title of We Are the Best-- despite the fact that they had been active for only eight years, released but four albums, and have come nowhere close to disturbing the Top 40 charts. For a band that's never met a meta-pop gesture it didn't relish, the premature best-of felt like the Chap's most extravagantly executed ruse yet, the ultimate comment on self-congratulatory celebrity culture and instant, internet-abbetted historicization.
Naturally, the Chap can't resist following one joke with another: After the faux-canonization of We Are the Best, they come crashing back down to the reality of being an unsung indie band-- albeit one admired by Britian's most famous science writer-- with We Are Nobody. But the new album reveals that We Are the Best was more than just an elaborate lark; its true purpose was to signal the closing of the Chap's first chapter. On 2010's transitory Well Done Europe, the Chap began to temper their blitzkrieg pop with more sophisticated, sobering songs that were less about mocking urban-bourgeois mores than examining the stress of keeping up appearances. We Are Nobody marks an even more pronounced break from the Chap's prankster past, to fully immerse itself in feelings of insecurity, isolation, and peer-pressured anxiety.
Prior to We Are Nobody's release, the Chap made the album's lyrics available for perusal on their website, and if you weren't aware of the source, a face-value reading of certain lines-- "feel like a car crash," "we were killed by this place long ago," and "painkiller please!"-- would lead you to believe their authors were destined for psychiatric treatment, if not suicide watch. But the Chap couch this darker subject matter in their sleekest, most elegantly crafted songs to date, wherein the influence of pop's reigning sardonicists, Steely Dan, becomes as much musical as it has always been spiritual.
Thanks to their associations with labels such as Lo (in the UK) and Ghostly International (in North America), the Chap are often discussed in terms of electro- or synth-pop, even though their music is just as reliant on traditional guitar/bass/drums elements as any rock act. But such mechanistic descriptors are understandable given their songs' orderly arrangements, with every purposeful bass fill, keyboard line, maraca shake, and vocal harmony inserted into and removed from the mix with mouse-click precision. And, of course, Johannes von Weizsäcker's unwaveringly anodyne voice-- and ability to maintain his perfect diction even at breakneck velocities-- amplifies this robotic quality, as he delivers his grave prognostications on the modern human condition with all the sterilized amiability of a customer-service rep.
But in emphasizing these attributes and suppressing their berserker instincts, We Are Nobody feels more anonymous than previous Chap albums; while "Talk Back" and the title track see the band assuredly following through on the new pop promise of Cut Copy's Zonoscope, similarly structured and themed songs like "Curtains" and "Running With Me" tend to blur into the same easy-listening groove. But the Chap are nothing if not self-aware of their own machine-like properties: The late-game pick-me-up "Hands Free" is both We Are Nobody's lone punk-rock rave-up, and also the song that wilfully draws the greatest attention to the artificiality of recorded performance. It essentially consists of Weizsäcker's foil Berit Immig repeating the same line ("give me surrender or give me death") in several different keys, as if toggling the settings on a synthesizer, before locking into the right one and kicking the song into blast-off mode. Thankfully, even on an album as world-weary as this, the Chap don't forget to put the "oui!" in ennui.
