Send "The Big Pink " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Guardian |
 At its best, The Big Pink's first album was a patchwork of fuzz and scuzz, but it was the bombastic pop of Dominos that took them beyond their east London enclave and into the charts. It makes sense, in a way, that much of this followup sounds like it's aiming to replicate the feel of that radio-friendly unit-shifter rather than the dreamy haze of early songs like Velvet. Occasionally it works. 1313 reaches for an anthem and somehow grabs hold of it, while single Hit the Ground (Superman) chugs along with style and confidence. But it crumbles as it goes along and barely staggers to a finish. Lyrics like "I wanna be adored", "yesterday's gone" and "doing it on my own", all from the bafflingly familiar Lose Your Mind, don't allay the suspicion that ideas are running low....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| There was a marked difference between the first and second time I heard the Big Pink's "Dominos," the lead single off their 2009 debut, A Brief History of Love. The former was during a late-night iTunes browsing session, when the London duo's electro-pop anthem sounded almost majestic—brash, drunken, and buzzing with a monstrous, low-end synth. The second time was while watching a rather formulaic car commercial some months later, and the track suddenly sounded painfully ordinary as fodder for a handful of rain-slicked, slow-mo shots. "Dominos" hadn't aged well, its once-ecstatic bombast now more of a bulky annoyance than the result of any kind of charismatic energy. Regardless, the track's formula is more or less used as a sweeping template for the Big Pink's sophomore effort, Future This, and, predictably, the album suffers the same fate as its forebear: grandly designed for stadium sing-alongs, but barely able to sustain the kind of dynamic melodies needed to accomplish such a feat. Such failure is a missed opportunity, as Future This largely tampers the more obnoxious moments of swagger found on A Brief History of Love in favor of a far more pensive brand of electronic Britpop. The Big Pink is no longer Oasis with keyboards, as opening track "Stay Gold" so ably demonstrates. "If you lead, I will follow," sings vocalist Robbie Furze in an English schoolboy howl thick with reverence. Here, the misogynist braggart of "Dominos" is notably absent, and that shift in mood extends to album highlights "Rubbernecking" and "The Palace (So Cool)" too. The latter is the Big Pink's most accomplished track to date, a kind of self-skewering meditation on the nature of delusion that swells with wave upon wave of bristly, effervescent synths. "It's the kind of make-believe that happens when you're with someone, for better or for worse," keyboardist Milo Cordell recently told Spin. "It can help build a bond with someone, but it can also really isolate you from everyone else."...full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Sonically, the Big Pink's 2009 debut delivered. A Brief History of Love's titanic choruses, huge production, and maxed-out volume were designed to explode on the radio. Though they didn't sound like Britpop, the term was applied anyway because the Big Pink seemed in the swaggering lineage of bands like Oasis, the Verve, and Mansun. But bands who emerge so fully formed sometimes lack staying power and, considering Big Pink co-founder Milo Cordell's roots running Merok Records during the cultural peak of blog-house and nu-rave, the band had to be aware of their potential limitations. The follow-up, Future This, finds the Big Pink as boxed in as their predecessors, recycling the same ideas with less conviction. The drop-off is clear in the album's first few seconds: "Stay Gold" bears blatant similarity to their previous hit "Dominos" but shifts the lyrical focus from consequence-free sex to homilies about staying true to your dreams. It's a troubling thread that runs throughout Future This: where the Big Pink once mastered the role of magnetic, womanizing loners, here their tilt towards positivity and pursuit of a connection with their audience comes off as uncomfortably needy. This results in ill-defined salvos like "Jump Music" that awkwardly try to position themselves as message songs despite having no discernable message. The Big Pink try to build a mythology by dropping references from their debut into new songs, as if the two lyrically divergent records were of a conceptual piece. They also toss in a reference to the Stone Roses' "I Wanna Be Adored", establishing kinship with another band that was ultimately sunk by not knowing how to follow up a huge debut. And later, "Hit the Ground (Superman)" is every bit as gimmicky as "Stay Gold", incorporating a sample of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" into its halting, Max Martin-like strut and illustrating the fatal flaw of Future This: their need to siphon the power of outside sources-- obvious samples, prefab slogans, even their borrowings from their own music. Where the Big Pink previously sounded invincible, nearly every attempt to intellectualize or streamline their sound makes Future This come off as timid and malnourished....full text |
The Big Pink lyrics Music videoclips
|
| ||||||||||||||||
