Since emerging in 2010, Everything Everything have written songs uniquely concerned with the modern human condition and its miserable roots in how we live. Like almost none of their indie-rock peers, the Manchester-based four-piece are attuned to the absurdity of the times: Tangled up in their hyperactive synth-pop are surreal vignettes about scoring dates during an airstrike (“My Kz, Ur Bf”), verses juxtaposing celebrity worship and drone warfare (“Undrowned”), and, in 2015’s “Fortune 500,” an empathetic account of an extremist driven to regicide. At their wittiest, the band’s volcanic melodies, pop culture zigzags, and swirling tongue-twisters can pop open your brain like a champagne cork. Everything Everything make coherent art from the shrapnel of rolling news.
On A Fever Dream, their fourth album, the melodramatically-inclined group confront an increasingly melodramatic and nightmarish world. Brexit is one named scourge, though beyond lamenting xenophobia on songs like “Put Me Together,” their targets are usually implied rather than stated. Luckily, unknotting Jonathan Higgs’ allusive lyrics makes for rewarding work. On “Big Game,” he sizes up an individual with dishonest intentions, an inflated sense of authority, and tinier-than-average hands (“Wrinkled little boxing glove”). In the end, the vaguest insult hits hardest: “I’m tired,” Higgs soothes over twinkling guitar, “And you are ridiculous.” On an album cast in the shadows of evil, it’s a welcome sort of rallying cry for the exhausted.
As their themes come into sharper focus, Everything Everything are planing down the fanciful arrangements that made their first records alien and thrilling. The band always managed to make haywire rhythms sound intuitive, but like 2015’s Get to Heaven, A Fever Dream is easier to digest yet somehow harder to love. Still, they’re sharp enough to pull off straight songs. Lead single “Can’t Do,” which sounds like SOPHIE’s “Bipp” after a glass of hot cocoa, observes a concerned citizen waking up to some nebulous threat: “That was the future on the phone/He says it’s up to me,” Higgs sings urgently. The narrator soon becomes defensive—“I can’t do the thing you want!”—and, absolved of guilt, slides back into hedonistic complacency. In the age of political extremes and ecological doom, the harried “reasonable man” is an archetype. Here, Higgs exorcizes his culpability and calls for collective responsibility.
In tackling generational anxieties, pop music tends to concern itself with the tip of the iceberg—the observable symptoms rather than the disease. For its part, A Fever Dream is at least conscious of the iceberg’s body, and never threatens to plow into it. Faint praise, maybe, but consider the perilous waters they inhabit: “Ivory Tower” opens with the harrowing scene of privileged racists dancing around a gallows in blackface, a dicey satire that would fail without Higgs’ nimble touch. Few of Everything Everything’s radio-refined peers bother trying to tap into present-day concerns, and fewer still could pull off the black humor of “Night of the Long Knives,” an end-of-days anthem whose diabolical synths sound like an air-raid siren performed with festival horns. As “the bomb” drops, Higgs’ narrator, unsure whether to be transfixed or terrified, glibly soothes his victims: “Shame about your neighborhood.” It’s a chilling brush-off, the familiar tone of official indifference when blood appears on the hands of the state.
When his punches land, Higgs is piercing enough to spar with Keston Sutherland, the fast-tongued British poet who intertwines the horrors of Iraq and Guantanamo with requiems to fast food and washing-machine product codes. Like Sutherland, Higgs’ dispassionate writing style conceals latent political outrage—at war, colonialism, and the economic system that demands their survival. Unlike Sutherland, Higgs’ words glimmer with sorrow: Everything Everything’s music feels emotionally open, despite lyrics that will scan as bewildering, vague, cryptic, or poetic, depending on your patience. Of present concerns, Higgs says he’s writing to tackle our mistrust of the media, police, and politicians, and “to tap into ideas of neighbours and communities.” That might sound facile—what use is community when the neighbors want to deport you?—but in practice, Everything Everything are nothing if not savvy craftsmen. A rare example of indie-rock insurrection in Britain, A Fever Dream—darkly glamorous, flamboyantly appalled—is a fine monument to the nation’s despair.
