On "Friday Night, Don't Ever Let It End", the fifth track of stadium braying on east London five-piece Spector's debut album, Fred Macpherson sings, "The honeymoon was over before the wedding had begun/ The Tropic of Capricorn left melting in the sun." Comparing the two with distinct caution, it makes sense for Macpherson to cite Henry Miller's second semi-autobiographical tract, in which he continued to figure out his voice as a writer, only to abandon it among the sweaty dregs of a relationship: Spector are the latest and most successful Macpherson vehicle. The other band members are never interviewed; one is a model. This new incarnation follows his bands Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man-- less remembered for their songs than being cited in Daily Mail stories about Macpherson dating Peaches Geldof-- and Les Incompetents, who released the excellent single "How It All Went Wrong" back in 2006.
Macpherson gets self-referential on "Upset Boulevard"-- "Rewind all your favorite songs/ Remind yourself how it went wrong/ Discuss the good times with your friends/ You'll never be 19 again." He once told The Guardian, "There was a certain passion or venom [in music] in 2003 that seems to have been replaced with hyper self-awareness and timidity." Spector's M.O. is to hark back to what he perceives as a halcyon time of titting about in indie discos in East London, although the songs are nowhere near as good as anything on the Killers' Hot Fuss, or even the relatively charming debuts of Razorlight and the Kaiser Chiefs. The lack of venom that Macpherson laments fails to materialize in his latest attempt at a writer's voice, which is just a conduit for weak lyrics-- girls and boys never want the same thing at the same time, poor Fred jilted by promiscuous socialite as if he's so pure, repeat, repeat, repeat-- but professional ambition far supersedes the band's creative ability.
Spector come from a modern UK "indie" culture of lowered expectations-- calling the LP Enjoy It While It Lasts implies an awareness of the futility and fleetingness of it all, as does the title of the Vaccines' debut album, What Did You Expect From… These titles are flimsy suits of armor to ensure that the records can't fail, because the implication is their creators never expected them to succeed or tried very hard at them in the first place.
Macpherson is an erudite, charming personality and he's capable of writing stronger, pithier songs than this; just listen again to "How It All Went Wrong" for proof of the fact from when he was just 16 or 17 years old. But the songs on Enjoy It While It Lasts are chugging, overwrought, and comically theatrical in a painful fashion, lowest common denominator fodder. Unsurprisingly, the record went in at No. 12 in the UK album charts on Sunday. (Though UK album sales are at an all-time low-- Rihanna's Talk That Talk went back to No. 1 the weekend before with sales of only 9,578.) As fame is apparently his fix, Macpherson's spoken patter would be better suited to a career as a television presenter; being in a band only mutes his rhetorical ability, though his commitment to the musical cause emphasizes what's at least a British trend, where so-called "indie" (Spector's label Fiction is owned by Polydor, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group) now constitutes its own strain of showbiz.
But whatever their intentions, what's really striking is how truly terrible this record is. The production is full of dreadful pitch-shifts, senseless electronic filigrees, widdly guitar solos that don't fit anywhere, cavernous reverb chambers to disguise the weakness of Macpherson's toneless voice. If Bay City Rollers-style shouting atop early Killers rejects with a hint of Denim sounds bad in theory, try "Chevy Thunder" for size, a spruced-up Springsteen, faux-Americana tale of "let's get outta here" bombast. That song's final hurrah is a slow, theatrical outpouring that sounds as if it were recorded in a church-- complete with painful whiffs of violin-- the first of many baffling, sonorous ballads here that sound more like the "X Factor" semi-final grab for sympathy than anything you'd associate with five spindly east London boys. That doesn't make Spector diverse; it makes Enjoy It While It Lasts a hot mess.
