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One of the most enduring images of Glastonbury 2008 was the sight of MGMT’s crowd spilling out of the John Peel tent, carrying the hook of ‘Kids’ in all directions like the seeds of a dandelion blown apart. That band were kings of their genre until, with their sophomore offering ‘Celebration’, they abdicated, leaving only their sickly looking cousins, Empire of the Sun, as heirs.
With that in mind when I heard The Naked and Famous’ single ‘Punching in a Dream’ I was simultaneously impressed and sceptical, remembering the misleading impression ‘Time to Pretend’ gave of its progenitors. ‘Passive Me, Aggressive You’ puts those fears firmly to bed.
‘All of This’ kicks things off with a deceptively simple melody that makes the chorus’ clever-clogs shift from four to five bar phrasing sound compelling and natural. Next comes the aforementioned single, a song so instantly gratifying that anyone blessed with a functional pair of ears and a functional pair of feet will find it difficult not to get their intervening body parts moving to it.
As good as ‘Punching…’ and the other tracks like it are, it’s a relief to discover the band have a lot more to offer. ‘Frayed’ for instance, with its dragging beat and overlapping boy/girl vocal parts is, even if very familiar to The XX’s ‘Crystalised’, a nice change of pace. This welcome variety of sounds makes ‘Passive Me…’extremely listenable; the album features garbled electronics, big guitar washes and noises that sound like Xiu Xiu performing a vacuum cleaner solo.
However, the group do spoil a couple of otherwise good songs with their arrangements. The pulses of electric floor-tom and twinkling keys on ‘Eyes’ make it sound so much like something out of the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack you miss half the song trying to figure out if it’s a parody.
Despite this the band displays an unexpected emotional maturity. The album’s biggest highlight is ‘No Way’, an acoustic lament for two lovers who are “never going to talk again” that evolves into an overtly epic, piano lead crescendo. Yeah, you can see it coming a country mile off, but so what? It’s a beatific mile and, whilst The Naked and Famous’ main trade is, undeniably, in danceable hooks, they’ve shown here that they’ll have something to fall back on if, one day, those are no longer enough.
