‘Pop’.
It’s the sound a bubble makes when it bursts. It’s an interchangeable term for any effervescent, sugary soft drink. And it’s a word that music writers love, just fucking love, to use. A whole bunch of them certainly thought it was the right thing to dub the sounds of Chicago’s Maps & Atlases around the time of their debut full-length Perch Patchwork. A record that yes, was probably more broadly ‘pop’ than the lightspeed noodling of Every Place is a House, but still started with two and a quarter minutes of wordless voice/guitar/drum interplay, arcing about all over the place in oddly timed harmony.
It’s in these sorts of situations that those three letters start to appear, for me, as a loaded term. The implications of its use by those music writers who concern themselves with the vague sphere of ‘alternative’ (another horrible term, but if I extrapolate all of these we’ll not get anywhere) music are twofold. Firstly, the pop descriptor neatly sidesteps any accusations of rockism, that most undesirable of ideologies, that might be thrown our poor writer’s way. Secondly, it implies (because of the attendant baggage of the word, which exists whether you agree with it or not) that said writer finds the music they are applying the term to light, easy, even insubstantial. And the thought of some smug fucker somewhere in the world, some person who considers themselves such a connoisseur that Maps & Atlases are as saccharine and soluble to them as the Fair Trade Demerara in their ristretto, just really grinds my gears.
So yeah, ‘pop’ got kind of stuck in my craw when thinking about Maps & Atlases, and so with a kind of masochistic glee I began to forage around the flutters and blips of Old and Gray, the opening gambit on Maps’ sophomore effort Beware and Be Grateful. It’s a song seemingly without hooks or even prominent melodies, let alone choruses. You’d have to be a proper twat to call Old and Gray ‘pop’.
For a little over six minutes I was just about as smug a fucker as those figments of my imagination that I’d been demonizing. Until forty-eight seconds into Fever, and the advent of a hopelessly endearing chorus that cribs unabashed off the likes of U2 (who once released an album called Pop, after all) or Simple Minds. Priggishly, I wanted to chalk it up as an anomaly. It’s not. The following Winter is probably the catchiest thing the band have ever written, David Davison’s odd, frog-in-throat voice and guitar acrobatics notwithstanding. And so it continues. The influence of Paul Simon (particularly the quintuple-platinum, chart-topping Graceland) is all over Beware and Be Grateful, in the African rhythms, use of vocal harmony, and the band’s wrangling of slanted – but yeah, pop – hooks. Besides which, tell me Vampires doesn’t sound like My Sharona. You won’t be able to. The song’s dismissive of semantics, Davison insisting that “I don’t know what the context is, of what you’re trying to say”, and its playful grind begs the jettison of academic notions and the ushering in of enjoyment. So that’s what I did. And as such, Beware and Be Grateful is now, for me, the best thing that Maps & Atlases have never done.
Aside from all that balls-out tunesmithery, Beware and Be Grateful’s key strength is its intimacy, arguably a new string to the Maps bow. Many of Beware’s lyrical themes are signified by it’s title – it’s a record about caution, learning, and coming to terms with new developments, and it’s a welcome influx of emotional warmth into the sound of a band whose musicianship can be so formidable as to be alienating. It turns Remote and Dark Years from a being little more than a brief marriage of the record’s Graceland influence to Police-y palm muting into the most majestic, moving song that Maps & Atlases have ever written. It stops the lengthy, Can-gone-tropical groove of Silver Self from becoming monotonous. And it means that Old and Gray, whilst still musically minimal and weird, becomes a startlingly close snapshot of the aftermath of a relationship, whereupon its hidden hooks begin to shyly reveal themselves.
As Davison notes on the effortless, timpaniphone Old Ash, the crudest terms are all encompassing. I still can’t quite bring myself to say that Beware and Be Grateful is a pop album. Rather, it’s an album containing ten pieces of music, some of which are the very closest to pop that a band like Maps & Atlases are likely to get, their ‘new breed in the making’, if you like. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s their finest and most accessible collection of songs to date. And so to close, a pithy little epithet from a favourite ‘pop’ act of mine:
“Just because you’re paranoid/don’t mean they’re not after you.”