English Rock: Athlete's Vehicles & Animals

Friday I said I wanted to write about my new favorite album that I just received in the mail. After giving way to past favorites, now is the time to talk about the new favorite: Athlete’s Vehicles & Animals.

You can hear Athlete trying to stretch themselves beyond Britpop or what I’d call the quintessential English Rock sound. This stretching yields a fully rounded Britpop sound. They’ve taken the sounds of Oasis, et. al., and furthered it with their compositional style. The sound is original even when finding comparisons with Turin Brakes and Coldplay.

When I first got Coldplay’s Parachutes, I couldn’t stop playing it. I normally like to keep listening to a variety of music, rarely repeating an album in the same week. I couldn’t stop listening to Parachutes. Now I feel that same way about Vehicles & Animals. The album fully envelopes me in its sound. It paints broad strokes with vocal lines and overarching melodies; it paints with splatters and jagged lines with the drum breaks, tempo changes, diverse directions, and beat programming.

Other places in the album have some great retro aspects—some of the keyboard effects, harmonies, guitar styling, all brings the 60’s and 70’s to mind. The band’s sound is wearing retro T-shirts even while jamming on an old Stone Roses song and listening to the crazy beats coming from today’s radio.

I’ve read review that compare Athlete to Polyphonic Spree and the Beta Band, and in places like the chorus of singers on the chorus of “Vehicles & Animals,” there’s clearly some shared sounds. However, where Spree and the Beta Band move towards creating an Electronica-like with their combinations of live and programmed instruments, Athlete remains mainly driven towards a more traditional rock song approach.

As diverse as Athlete’s sound is, I don’t really have trouble placing them in the Spectrum in that quintessential English Rock grouping. “You Got the Style,” the UK Top 40 single, has that backbeat sound, a rock song that has a hip-hop feel, but doesn’t try to have anything but a Britpop vocal. “Out of Nowhere” has got a world beat, a rap-sing bridge, a good, ol’ Clash-like “Hurrah!” but again doesn’t ever shake off the Britpop sound. Yet, that’s a good thing for a lover of Britpop. Take Britpop in a different direction, yes, but still give me that Britpop. That’s why Oasis caught my attention; that’s why Coldplay took up residency in my CD player; that’s why I can’t stop listening to Vehicles & Animals. I’ll just be singing along to tracks like “El Salvador” and “Westside,” singable anthems of English Rock.

Thanks to Katie at Astralwerks for the review copy. Because of her support of Music Spectrum, I’ve added a permanent Astralwerks logo link to the sidebar.