Carry Me - Bombay Bicycle Club - Single Review

It’s normally distasteful for guitar bands to dabble in electronic music. At best the result will be some kind of regurgitated synth-pop with a Talking Heads sample thrown in somewhere. However, Carry Me was inevitable.

Progressively, Bombay Bicycle Club’s plethora of genre-spanning music has been determinedly pushing itself in the direction of dance music – disregarding their 2010 sophomore release, Flaws (entirely acoustic folk album almost released under a pseudonym because it was “just so different”). 2009’s “I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose” birthed Always Like This, a melodious, atypically indie-rock gem with Jack Steadman’s repetitive/quivering vocals, Afro-beat inspired drumming and a delirious bass line.

Extensive and intensified electronic and world influences infiltrated through the band’s last effort in 2011, the critically acclaimed ‘A Different Kind Of Fix’. Shuffle presented a gripping piano sample, the cornerstone for the song with numerous layers of equally enthralling bass, handclaps and that kind of feeling you get when someone pushes you very high on a swing and your chest fills with air (only sustained for nearly four minutes).

Steadman’s experimental solo endeavours have been floating around YouTube and Soundcloud like a silent blush on the façade of Bombay Bicycle Club’s official releases. Nonetheless, the Fela-Kuti-come-Nujabes plate of beats he awkwardly constructs seep into the band’s music perhaps slightly undetected, but each record sees this side become more apparent.

Percussive from the start, a mixture of grimy bass and trumpet soon give way to diluted cymbals. Steadman’s signature vocals have been filtered through a razor – they shake comfortably as they usually do but are sharper, yet still fade into a layered, concordant veil of whirring guitars. Somehow cosmic, tremolo-ing into the night – a party in the purple and blue haze of what feels as light as empty space. The pulsating of the bass stops momentarily and these guitars are isolated in their heavy reverberation; a niche that Bombay Bicycle Club established in their previous LP. The silver coated voice – “If anybody wants to know / Our love’s getting old” in no way premeditates the almost enigmatic chorus from which the song draws its name. Pixie-esque yet fervent, Lucy Rose brings back the vocal sample used in Steadman’s Travelling Song, an underlying ebb of “I won’t change / You know that” edges toward ironic lyricism in regard to the band’s overall progression over the years.

But yes, the course of the song remains somewhat the same, interchanging the same two or three melodies – though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Rather, it fits with the unconventional structure of the song: several small climaxes, embellished with fleeting synth-keyboard chimes which take the form of shooting stars, floating arias between Rose and Steadman, white noise transformed into rain, a hiss: rhythmic, sublime. The exponentially en par production of the track (and upcoming album) is indebted to the amount of late-night jams and bedroom demo-recordings collated by Steadman in his musical lifetime. It’s commendable. On first listen this production is “overdone”, it is “pasty”. On further rotation one can hear how unbelievably busy the song is, the white-hot and intricate texture: layer upon layer upon layer, creating an abyss of energy, urging you to dance.

Maybe their sound is changing – but it has always been changing. It is changing. Despite this, the melodic patterns within Carry Me are so quintessentially Bombay Bicycle Club, each note after another a signifier of who you are listening to; alongside Steadman’s unmistakable vocal nuances. They are moving steadily in this direction, some kind of exhilarating electro-dream-pop. Shifting form, sonically breaking free from the mould that is «indie», into which most twenty-something-bands-from- London descend into. This is no downward spiral. It was inevitable.

Review by Jessica Syed

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