There are many significant, jump-out-at-you facts about Biffy Clyro at present. Ignored by much of the mainstream press for, well, much of their 10 years (yes, that’s another one, they’ve been together a decade), the band declare that they want to make a pop album. Suddenly they’re media darlings, with NME features and Kerrang covers. Musically, they’ve changed too – initially ‘jangly’, ‘angular’ and ‘post-rocky’ they’ve had a flirtation with almost-metal on their second and third albums, but have almost stumbled towards a commercial record… or maybe the mainstream came to meet them. Whatever.
All this can’t overshadow the sheer horror that opens up this album – a mock operatic/prog rock intro with fake orchestral sounds and downright silly vocals means that it’s a full minute-and-a-half before anything happens (another 10 seconds and the CD would have gone out the window). Have Biffy jumped the shark on ‘Living Is A Problem’? Incredibly, this is a single, though it has a bit of an infectious rush once it gets going. Thank the lord.
‘Saturday Superhouse’ is similarly a bit of post-grunge, rattling along nicely with a kind of typical Biffy non-chorus but with riffs aplenty. The curiousity value continues. ‘Who’s Got a Match’ somehow mixes up Abba’s ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ with a Fratellis-style guitar hook and as you can tell, things are starting to go awry. The lyrics seem perhaps odder than ever – ”There’s a man selling dozens of bones… every type of bone except the one that I want” on ‘As Dust Dances’. Is it just me who always found the lyrics either too clever or too dumb for their own good at times? There are harks back to emo too (if we can still use that term without ridicule) – ‘Whole Child Ago’ shows that they used to listen to The Promise Ring, and not, say… oh, say it, Snow Patrol. Because there’s an ever-pervading feeling that they’ve “done a Lightbody”.. but in reverse: where Snow Patrol beefed up the delicate feel of their second album to universal acclaim on Final Straw, Biffy have softened the full-on rock of theirs to create the pop album, which, to be fair, they freely admit to setting out to make. ‘Semi-mental’s still a good radio single, as is ‘Folding Stars’ – if you’re head of programming at Radio One.
This will sound like one of those reviews which sees former heroes depart off to the big time and some sort of blind jealousy on the part of a spurned fan who remembers them from shows to a dozen people in the Note. That’s not really the case but I’d not expect you to believe that. instead, I will holler “Go on, the Biffy” as they vanish over the horizon on their way to the top of the charts.