The 1975 - Being Funny In A Foreign Language

It feels like an eternity since i last reviewed an album. I guess technically it has only been 10 days, so merely a minor eternity, what's Target's collection of bespoke despair and misery have for us? It really is a terrible selection of garbage, by the way. I naively thought the retail record rennaissance might bring us something good, but nope, we jumped straight back to Now That's What I Call 5 songs everyone sort of remembers from 30 years ago and could make their own crappy mix tape straight from youtube of. Makes me want to puke. Now, there is stuff that i would more than happily review if i were getting paid. I'd intently listen to Lizzo or The Weeknd or Olivia Rodriguez or even Tony Bennet and Lady Gaga being confused as to how they ended up in the same room together. I'm not gonna lie and say Chris Stapleton isn't amazing at what he does, because he is, but i'm also not exactly gonna listen to it out of the kindness of my own wallet. I prefer Rock and Metal, the weirder and grotesquely noisier the better. I will totally buy the new Tyler The Creator album if nothing else strikes my fancy, but this one looks sort of promising... 

Who the hell are The 1975? Apparently they're an English Indie/Pop/Rock band who formed 20 years ago, i'm holding their 5th album in my hand, but nope i've never heard of them. I have tried Being Funny In A Foreign Language though, so we're off to some kind of start at least. 

I do like the confusion my brain feels looking at the album cover. Italics for no discernable reason, Ninja posing on top of a rusted out/graffitied up car deserted on an unpopular beach, an explicit content warning, that's all right up Absurd Alley, and the drab and merely functional back of the jacket is only about 4 shades darker than my favorite shade of blue. I'm a little trepidatious in terms of British Indie, Glass Animals was not exactly what i look for in sliced bread, but we give everyone an equal chance to impress on their own terms here in my brainspace. Today it merely has to be better than the "be happy Fabreze" jingle that's eating a hole in my medulla. Alright, The 1975's Being Funny In A Foreign Language gets the treatment. 

I personally do not care one iota, nor even a theta or an omicron (holy crap, my brain just recited the entire Greek alphabet) about the color of the vinyl, but i do like lyric sheets. Lots of instruments here, normal band stuff with additional keyboards and strings and saxamophones, so that's good. Weird as it may seem, i also very much like poly bags as opposed to shrink wrap. That could turn gimmicky pretty quick, if corporate america finds out, but for now it has a slight air of authenticity to it, like Dirty Hit is actually proud of releasing this album on vinyl. Not surprisingly, The 1975 is literally their most successful band. I thought about saying "only," but that's way too presumptuously pompous of me, so i didn't. 

Now i think is the time when i actually attentively listen to it [checks instruction manual] yep! Aw crap, i forgot i was playing guitar the last few nights. Hold on, let me unplug the mixer and plug back in the turntable and reboot all this software and twiddle with the cartridge to get less static and more left ear. Ok, now we can go. 

Pianocophony with strings and a rundown of meme life in the form of an apology to 17 year olds. This is gonna be great, i'm already hooked. 

I knew the comparison to Glass Animals wouldn't be totally wrong, but this is waaaaay better. This actually sounds like the 80s, but in a Vampire Weekend meets Huey Lewis kind of way. It's all over the place, and my goodness the specificity of drugs is delectable. It's not Baroque Pop, but it kind of is the same psychedelic melange of sounds, like a vapor-wave version of string quartet infused 80s Pop. There is the Adam Levine meets Millie Vanillie quality i tend to not like, but they use it as a backdrop for feeling suicidal because the girl who's cuckholding him has the only name that fits the rhyme scheme of the song. Yes that's a paraphrase, but no it's not inaccurate. This album is bizarre. 

It's like if John "freshly reCougered" Mellencamp wrote a Volfpeck album with just enough "fucks" to qualify for the Tipper Sticker, or like if U2 and Spoon wrote a song together. 

It feels sarcastic, doesn't it? Like, this can't possibly be face value. Telling him you love him is almost certainly not all he needs to hear. What the hell is Wintering (track B3)? 

No really, what the hell am i listening to? I love it, but this is bonkers. "Our first kiss was Christmas in the Walmart toy department" followed by "'Central Park is Sea World for trees.'" No really, that's what she said, hence the single inside double quotes. And the schmoozy saxophone is smeared all over this thing. 

This album is literally the worst twitter or facebook scroll you've experienced over the last 2 years. That's what it is, you can't tell what's your friends or a sponsored ad or if you accidentally joined a group you absolutely don't belong in. No genre differentiation whatsoever, melodies and scribbles unironically blended into melancholic run-on sentences and the album just ends without any sense of closure or arrival or conclusion at all. 

Look, i can't in all honesty say that anyone else will love this, but it's a fantastic album for what it is. It is exactly like opening facebook and reactionary laughing because its all such tragically humorous gibberish. No one could possibly be like this in real life, but my lanta is it depressing to realize no, yeah, this is actually real in its preposterous unreality. This album is the audio equivalent of one of those terrible 5-Minute Craft/MetDaan reels where they plug leaking pipes with vegetables and cut up plastic soda bottles to glue to the wall instead of just painting the room a different color. 

If we have to compare it to something, that something has to be Vampire Weekend, but in a disturbingly Foster The People kind of way. Yeah, this whole album feels like if Vampire Weekend did a cover of Pumped Up Kicks. It doesn't sound like that, it sounds more like Duran Duran and Bryan Adams produced an LCD Soundsystem album. 

I've done some digging and i've come to the conclusion that The 1975 is quite well known (meaning extensively marketed), but not what i would consider mainstream. I'm no doubt wrong about that, but that's because i can't handle more than 10 minutes of Ed Sheeran and Mike Posner and the like to have a proper handle on the nowadays pop charts. I guess if Phoebe Bridgers can be considered mainstream now then these guys can be too. Like i said, i'm a pre-2010 Rock and Metal guy. I do know this is good, though. I feel like i need to balance it out with the properly understandable horror of Billie Eilish's When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go, but i think that's just my inner karmic balance in need of leveling. 

So all in all, properly entertaining. I'd gladly listen to it again some time.