Playlouder - Music is the Network

Scots rockers Biffy Clyro have been around for 9 years now and this singles compilation, as is so often the case, is part of a contractual obligation. Last year the band left Beggars Banquet, the indie label that put out their first three fan base building but not mainstream-troubling albums. Then they released album number four, Puzzles, which with its stadiumified FM sound went on to sell a lot of copies, and blag them support slots with the likes of the Rolling Stones and a Japan and Australia headline tour. 

Beggars then decided to release this hastily compiled CD of singles from the first 3 albums, with no extras or nothing man! Predictably, debate rages in the fetid dark corners of British indie message boards as impassioned teens argue the hoary debate of staying real and selling out, and bemoan the lack of b-sides and abundance of “single versions” (which, on listening to the album versions available on this very website, are often quite different) on the release. 

But, I ask you, who cares when we’re talking about a band as so depressingly mediocre as this. Wallowing in a kind of bleached denim nostalgia and oblique bad-emo-poetry lyricism, their very name is an infuriating mix of mystery and meaninglessness. As all the reviews ever state, their obsessive fans love to chant “C’mon the Biffy” at all the gigs, which tells you all you need to know about the emotionally inarticulate drunken embracers that make this stuff popular and refer to a band with sentimental teary eyed affection as if it’s some kind of ailing alcoholic footballer. It’s metal-lite, it’s post-hardcore-lite, it’s interesting music from other places with the desperate inspiration and wretched straining removed, replaced with a cloying knowingness and no sense of danger whatsoever.

Sure, as tracks like the irritatingly titled Toys Toys Toys Choke, Toys Toys Toys show, they know how to make engaging enough melodic heavyish rock with some vaguely unexpected stop-start bits, and 57 takes me back to hormone-addled days at pubs in Southampton when they used to tour the same toilet venues as Muse (they were reunited in a support slot on Muse’s recent Wembley Stadium extravaganza).  And it’s nice when they do that multi-vocal thing here and there, a few yelps and screams circulating at the same time. But Idlewild’s first album this ain’t. There’s no excitement, no tangible energy… It just seems so flat and workmanlike, compelling the listener back to the sources of these sounds – At The Drive In, Sunny Day Real Estate, Therapy? - before they became filtered through BC’s dour rock sensibilities.

The later singles like Glitter and Trauma, and the actually pretty good Only One Word Comes to Mind try and shake things up with some extra-jerky guitar moves and two-step kickdrum beats but before you know it they’ll launch into a yawn-inducingly obvious chorus complete with nicely paced guitar kick-in and epic-frontman intonations, like the Foo Fighter’s less charismatic younger brothers. If this singles compilation is meant to represent the old “weird” stuff, then the new stuff’s gonna be sound-tracking slow-mo football replays near you very soon. Oh hang on, it already is.