When Newcastle quintet Maximo Park emerged in 2005, it was on the crest of a spiked-guitar-and-regional-vocals wave then being successfully surfed by Franz Ferdinand, The Futureheads and Kaiser Chiefs. Debut LP ‘A Certain Trigger’ was produced by Paul Epworth, who’d also manned the desk for Bloc Party’s first. So far, so very fashionable. However, since then the band have found themselves (on the 2006 NME tour) in the unenviable position of headlining over the meteorically rising Arctic Monkeys. The winds of the zeitgeist are notoriously cruel and when they change, they can leave a band out in the cold, shivering and forlorn. Happily, fans offer a great deal of protection and Maximo Park’s have helped sell out – in 45 minutes – every date on their upcoming tour.
They’ve had to stump up for tickets long before being able to hear ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’, however. So, will it have them falling in love all over again, or will they be bombarding the blogosphere with bitter complaints?
Well. There’s little to spook the faithful here. Maximo Park still front very much like a post-millennial Gene, Paul Smith hasn’t tempered his Geordie twang one whit and he’s still keen to convince us of both his struggling ordinary-blokeness (‘Girls Who Play Guitars’, ‘By The Monument’) and of his intellectual interests (‘Russian Literature’, ‘Books From Boxes’). Live, these songs may well excite, but on record they flatline, drawing attention to cut-and-shut song structures, post-punk guitars that could have been lifted from a Blink 182 record and a vocal style Morrissey might regard as overly mannered. ‘Your Urge’ and ‘A Fortnight’s Time’ are noteworthy only for the fact that they feature the try-hard words ‘tessellate’ and ‘dialectical’, ‘Karaoke Plays’ because it points out that Maximo Park could actually kill it in America – were it not for Smith’s accent. Clearly, this album will make a lot of people happy. It’s just hard not to wonder who the hell they are.
