Rockin’ robot helps create their best album in years
Everything Everything Raw Data Feel
NOT many songwriters are worthy of a book solely of their lyrics. Unhitched from the music, plenty of couplets can lose their sparkle. Caps Lock On, however, which arrives on the same day as this sixth album from Manchester art rockers Everything Everything, promises to be a riveting read. Frontman Jonathan Higgs has consistently had the right image to skewer the surreal warp speed anxiety of the internet age, including addressing Donald Trump: “Someone’s gonna burst your blood-blubber head… someone’s gonna pull your big trousers down.” This time he had some help... from a computer developed at the University of York contemporary music research centre, using artificial intelligence to spew out potential lyrics from the vast quantity of text Higgs fed it. Though the frontman says he ended up using only five per cent of the results, including the song title Software Greatman.
It will be a few more years before computers prove capable, as Higgs does here, of coming up in the album with the line: “He’s Obama in the streets but he thinks he’s Osama in the sheets.” There’s also a very human quality to the joy in the music produced by the rest of the quartet.
After 2020’s denser, darker Re-Animator album, this one is packed with bright, zesty energy. Teletype opens with nimble digital blips and an immediately lovable chorus, before I Want a Love Like This picks up the pace further with Ibiza-ready arms-aloft house music. If you’ve found the band irritating in the past, you may yet be reeled in. Even with a little robotic help, they deserve all the credit for producing their best collection in years.