Credit the UK with this: their bands are exceptionally fast at processing trends, evolving in mere weeks where their American cousins often take whole months or-- gasp!-- even years to catch up. As Blur and Oasis battled it out on the charts, dozens of copycats battled it out to be the next Blur or Oasis. Nearly every iteration of U2 instantly inspired its share of imitators. When Radiohead went weird, a hundred British bands went weird with them. After Coldplay hit it big playing nice, many of those would-be revolutionaries decided a hug was better than a slap, and likewise put down their guitars in favor of pianos.
Hell, sometimes the British even pick up on American trends before Americans do. Witness the overseas rise of the White Stripes or Strokes before their domestic breakthroughs. In retrospect, the success of the Strokes in particular seems to have been the major catalyst for the UK's current guitar revolution, setting the stage for the galvanizing arrival of the Libertines and, later, the Arctic Monkeys. These are hybrid acts of a sort, shaggy, reluctant, and rough like their fame-wary American indie cousins but still swaggering and confident like their UK predecessors.
God only know what the impact of the Libertines or the Arctic Monkeys will fully evince in the near future, but clearly the wheels are already in motion. In fact, however tangential their styles, it's hard to imagine the Maccabees existing without either of those bands as predecessors or peers, not to mention even more likeminded acts such as Bloc Party or the Futureheads (fellow rediscoverers of the Gang of Four and XTC). In fact, even though the Maccabees have been humping it out for a few years now, the group's debut Colour It In sounds so banally of-the-now that it beggars the imagination.
Fittingly, it turns out, as imagination is just what the disc so sorely lacks. The Maccabees supposedly settled on their name after picking it randomly from the Bible, which is just as well, since the band sounds like they settled on their sound as arbitrarily, albeit with an eye toward the charts. Indeed, the record is frontloaded with the band's breakthrough UK singles, but those singles do the band no favors. "X-Ray", with its call-and-response vocals and slashing guitars, is a total Gang of Four cop. "Latchmere" is the band's entry into the proud UK tradition of documenting the quotidian, in this case a London indoor pool and "leisure center" ("Latchmere's got a wave machine," goes the song).
In between is the token XTC number "All in Your Rows", making the most out of Orlando Weeks' affected yelp. Later on the group even tosses a few love songs into the mix, albeit love songs of a particularly creepy bent. "Precious Time" features the icky Bon Scotty line "I held you down and I held my own." "First Love" is probably meant to be self-deprecating, but "I've made my bed I'll lie in it and pillow talk you into it" is a far cry from clever. And if there's surely a sad back-story to "Lego" and "Tissue Shoulders", neither is compelling enough to linger too long over.
The album doesn't do a lot of lingering itself, but even at a brisk 35 minutes, Colour It In struggles to overcome the suspicion you've heard it all before. Not just from another band, mind, but from just five minutes ago, on the same CD, from the same band. No doubt, there's a certain effortless quality to the rush of hooks and herky-jerk rhythms, but that's not to say the Maccabees shouldn't have put a little more effort into them. With studiously idiosyncratic songs and easy sentimentalism, the group has started its career backed into a corner by its would-be trademarks. The Maccabees are all wound up, but with nowhere to go. At least not until some other band mutates and points them in a new direction.
