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| Contactmusic |
 British Sea Power don't do small or subtle. They make statement indie, macroscopic music which aims for the stars. It's hardly surprising that the band have played gigs inside the Arctic circle and on top of The Great Wall Of China; for the majority of their career, they seem to have been striving to create songs perfectly suited to just such an occasion, songs which capture man's astonishment and wonder when faced with the beauty of the Arctic or The Great Wall's monumental scale. They haven't always succeeded, because their ambition often outstrips their ability to write memorable songs, but they can't be faulted for trying. Valhalla Dancehall doesn't break any new ground for the group. Their claim that it sounds like 'a mixture of Serge Gainsbourg and Ralf and Florian era Kraftwerk with a sprinkle of Stock, Aitken and Waterman' is presumably tongue-in-cheek, because the album sounds nothing like any of those figures. It sounds like British Sea Power. Long-standing fans will enjoys its self-consciously epic, slow-building tracks, its swelling guitars, lovelorn vocals and literate lyrics; most of the songs collected here wouldn't sound out of place on the second half of their debut album, The Decline Of British Sea Power. One track, the entertaining 'Thin Black Sail', nods to the relatively frantic and spiky first half of that record, a move which should please those wishing the band would write more songs along the lines of the Pixies-influenced 'Apologies To Insect Life'. The rest of the album, however, is consistently and determinedly capital-E Epic and capital-I Important. It's perhaps unsurprising that the album's opening song, 'Who's In Control', makes a grab for the territory of another self-consciously Important band, their current tour mates the Manic Street Preachers, by bolting a topical political lyric onto unsubtle stadium-indie riffing. The anti-cuts lyrics are a little awkward ('sometimes I wish that protesting was sexy on a Saturday night'), but they pull off the look competently enough, and the song has enough about it to become a favourite of newly politicised students. After that, it's back to normal service lyrically, with romanticised tales of 'beautifully wounded' girls and watching 'the nebulae explode'....full text |
| Bbc |
| While British indie music remains at the mercy of boom and bust hype cycles and the vagaries of fashion – just how dated do The Libertines sound now? What happened to Klaxons’ second album? – it’s quite possible that the greatest achievement of Brighton’s British Sea Power is to have something approximating a stable, modest, ‘normal’ career. Viewed fondly by the music press but never hyped to the heavens, making accessible music but clearly unburdened by the desire to write a hit, eccentric but never preposterous, BSP’s three previous albums proper have each scored strong reviews and incrementally higher chart positions and fourth set Valhalla Dancehall seems profoundly unlikely to buck that trend. Mixing the sort of luminescently sinister ballads that have stood the band in good stead throughout their career with chaotic, colourful smears of guitar rock that break with the sepia tones of 2008’s Do You Like Rock Music?, this is an album that neither treads water nor reinvents the wheel. Instead, it sees BSP continue their stately, unruffled progress. It’s the band’s dense, oblique lyricism that’s generally prevented their oft-anthemic guitar rock seeming regressive, but on tracks like Who’s in Control?, Georgie Ray and Living is So Easy the band warp the music to match the words; stormy, elastic squalls of incandescent sound that lack the hooky polish of the band’s early material, yet seethe and churn with greater force. "Sometimes I wish protesting was sexy on a Saturday night!" roars vocalist Hamilton on Who’s in Control? before pummelling drums and screeds of feedback obliterate the song’s vestigial structure; there’s something of the roiling disorder we’ve seen on the UK’s streets of late to the track, music to bother royalty to....full text |
| Bowlegsmusic |
| There aren’t many bands out of the mainstream that can claim the kind of loyal support that British Sea Power have. The Brighton band’s fans are devoted to the music. Perhaps it’s because they know what they’re going to get. Five albums down the line and the band haven’t really deviated from the blueprints set out on 2003’s debut, ‘The Decline of British Sea Power’. It’s the U2 school of setting your stall out early and keeping it there come hell or high water. It’s the Oasis book of sticking to what you know. And there’s nothing really wrong with that. The fans like it – they have their t-shirts, they have their scarves: they show their support like steadfast indie puppies – throw us another album and we’ll fetch it with watery eyes and tongues-a-wagging. This is in no way a bad thing; more bands could benefit from this kind of musical fidelity from audiences. The digital age has turned most of us into the most fickle sound whores, who play the field and will drop all interest in a band at the slightest hint of a battered fedora or something more zeitgeist. Haven’t released anything in three months – we don’t want to know. BSP’s latest effort, ‘Valhalla Dancehall’, is exactly what you’d expect from a BSP album. There’s the familiar sound, the familiar production. If anything, there’s less urgency, less edge than you’ll find in the band’s earlier releases. The song-writing is solid and the lyrics are, as you’d expect, clever, occasionally witty and often affecting. There are some nice changes in pace: ‘Observe the Skies’ is all up-tempo indie pop with some Pixie-esque guitar moments, while following track ‘Cleaning Out the Rooms’ slows things down with an slow-building understated beauty. It’s solid stuff from a solid band....full text |
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