All the Pictures - I Have A Brother! Review

Published by Al Young | Filed under Music

People just have to try to bend the barriers of genres of music, don’t they? It makes the job of any would-be music critic infinitely more difficult: you immediately can’t pigeonhole bands to be a complete snob or to express your indie cred anymore. Here, with All the Pictures, a new monster is born: a blend of folk, electronica and pop unlike all such blends I’ve heard before. Nuances of the music of Patrick Wolf, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Four Tet and even the playful eccentricity of Kid Carpet can be seen in the delightful music on display.

Even so much as the opening bar first track on the album (Fingers) lets you know what you’re in for over the course of the I Have A Brother! album: guitar lines bordering on the twee of early Death Cab for Cutie songs lead you in to a song of the most quaint of vocal deliveries and varied instrumentation smacking of influences which I have already mentioned; however, the music has a certain quality all of its own – it’s both playful and serious; dark and light.

The next two songs on the album, The Deaf Boy’s Dad and Pretty Green Shoes tell more sombre tales, and the music reflects this whilst remaining generally uptempo. Twice more, a lack of inhibition with experimentation with varying timbres and textures is shown: perhaps so much so to demonstrate what could almost be a disdain for the now almost ‘standard guitar + bass + drums + whiney, accented vocals = music’ formula so many bands are seen to follow nowadays. All the Pictures break from this mould and aspire for better, more noble things. It is music for the love of music, and it shows.

Kings is a song of, once again, dramatic instrumentation, with a slight bias towards synthesiser parts reminiscent of the toy keyboards we’ve all had at some point: they provide a lovely hook to an already excellent song. For JFK, For You is a nice demonstration of All the Pictures’ sampling ability and love of simplistic yet catchy melodies. It also serves as an interlude and part introduction for the next track Fish.

Most definitely my ‘stand out’ track of the album, Fish starts with a hook which won’t let go and features such memorable and (as much as it pains me to use the adjective) ‘sweet’ lyrics such as ‘if I had the money, I would buy you the world; but I don’t, so I steal it instead’ in combination with tambourine percussion and keyboards sharp enough to cut through the drumbeat is enough to make this song become an instant favourite of anyone with a heart. Catherine of Aragon is much the same as far as poppy hooks are concerned: they latch into your brain in an almost viral manner and never let go. Never.

Fish Reprise is indeed little more than a repetition of the instrumental themes of Fish, but knowing my thoughts on the original, it’s an easy conclusion to make that that didn’t bother me in the slightest. The Man Who Saved the World is the most instrumentally thick of the album’s 11 songs, but it suits the almost vehement nature of the vocals most well. From its pleasant start, the song gradually builds up over the first two minutes to form an almighty crescendo, and then declines again to the end of the song. It’s as close as this album gets to ‘shock-and-awe’ tactics to maintain the audience’s interest, but it most definitely works.

Hymn for the Titanic is another small instrumental track most befitting of the type of music on display, and introduces Smile! Smile! Smile Today!, the final track of the album, with great splendour. The song itself is strong: very strong. It’s not one of those final tracks which will be forgotten due to its monotony and the listener’s decline in concentration: if yours had declined, it would be pulled back by the upbeat, engaging and (most importantly) danceable nature of this fine display of Birmingham creativity. It’s twee, it’s happy: it’s everything that you want from folky electronica. It’s the future, and I hope it doesn’t go by unseen.