Perhaps when the time comes to organize 2013 into neat lists, the year's biggest musical surprise won't be David Bowie's return, or whoever turns out to be this year's Lana Del Rey, but a distinctly unlikely embrace of art rock: Liam Gallagher was on the cover of last week's NME to discuss Beady Eye's second record, which Dave Sitek is producing. "He's a fucking outlaw," Gallagher says. "He's the best producer I've ever worked with, ever." If that's not the definitive sign that the dinosaurs of Manchester's music scene are keeling to a cold wave, the Ouroboros finally spitting out its own tail in favor of a more challenging palette, then the fact that most of the city's emerging young bands pay no heed to the legacy of Oasis, the Stone Roses, or even much post-punk, is one on the scoreboard for evolution. At the forefront of the sea change are Everything Everything and Dutch Uncles, and both their wonky, brainy strands of pop take delight in disassembly: EE like to pull the body asunder to see how we work; Dutch Uncles splay language to look between the lines.
Over the past century, messages have been divided into zeroes and ones for purposes of primitive transmission, encoded secrets, S.O.S. signals; the title of Dutch Uncles' third album, Out of Touch in the Wild, implies that the five-piece might need to make a few of the latter calls. But the record isn't a portrait of some haphazard attempt at going full Walden; the wilderness here concerns the lesser visited extremes of domesticity-- the deep waters of infatuation suddenly turning dark, and watching friends succumb to drugs, the addiction to mind fireworks extinguishing whatever external spark they once had. To make sense of the smeariness of these experiences, Dutch Uncles stick to a rigidly pointillist, exacting scheme of glassy, Reichian xylophone and marimba, Talk Talk-y guitar ticks, and choppy Stravinsky-inspired string sections, for a prismatic take on herky-jerky pop that approaches complex situations like a beguiling data visualization.
Out of Touch is far from all head without heart, but singer and pianist Duncan Wallis' primary lyrical and emotional defense mechanism-- and that's the primary position from which he sings-- is to clam up for sake of keeping the peace. "There's a time to hide everything/ The way that you are, where you've been," he sings at the start of "Fester", an ominous sign that even the record's creators might have held it at arms' length. But tiny clues emerge: "The times I hide behind a smile/ That says you were right/ You were always right," betrays a sardonic acceptance of the futility of trying to argue, while the rigidly rhythmic xylophone tings are undercut with a palpable sense of agitation; like watching someone give an important speech while failing to subtly relieve an itch caused by their suit.
The band have specified the meaning of a few of the songs-- the spinning, baroque "Godboy" is about a friend's hopeless death, the wonky funk of "Bellio" concerns the first taste of an intense sensation-- but you'd be hard pushed to tell. "Thematically it's just saying, I'm fucked, I don't know what's going on," Wallis has said, and lines like, "Never has it been so long since thoughts consoled/ But the reason that came before is gone," from "Phaedra" (think Shugo Tokumaru covering Wild Beasts) function like wordy shields protecting an ineffable sensation. The constant tip-toeing around emotion is frustrating, the effect coming off like a message broken in transmission.
However, the main appeal of Out of Touch in the Wild is how Dutch Uncles have succeeded in their goal of making a proper "studio record." The fragmented texture of the songs doesn't allow it to slip into bland slickness, but it's clean, theatrical, and kookily conservatorial in a pretty satisfying fashion, if occasionally a little too keen to change tacks within a single song. "Threads" begins with cascades of xylophone and marimba, as if running through a beaded curtain emporium, its tonal shifts steered by stealthily deployed bass lines; "Nometo" riffles through whooshing, regal phases with a similar anachronistic virtuosity to Field Music, and closer "Brio" forsakes dense pointillism for a slurpy, stuttering take on krautrock that acts as something of a relieving coda after all that agitation and anxiety. If there's one thing that's universal about this addictively jittering, nervy bunch, it's that Dutch Uncles fully understand that one of the only ways to manage overwhelming experiences is to implement a sense of structure and routine-- even if you know it's just a facade.
