These New Puritans: Inside the Rose review – swimming in ideas

(Infectious Music)
While not as commercial as they profess, TNP’s fourth album is surprisingly direct and romantic

Amid the round of interviews to promote These New Puritans’ fourth studio album, an intriguing detail emerged. At some juncture during its lengthy gestation, George Barnett – who with his twin brother Jack now comprises These New Puritans, once a four-piece – had assured the band’s record label that what they were working on was “the most commercial thing ever”. This, for anyone with a passing knowledge of the band’s output over the last decade, would constitute a fairly dramatic shift in priorities. On arrival they seemed the archetypal mid-2000s indie band: in debt to post-punk, good with a provocative interview quote, and with a sideline in collaborating on Hedi Slimane’s Dior Homme catwalk shows.

Then things took an unexpected turn. Their second album, 2010’s Hidden, offered up Japanese taiko drums, martial-sounding blasts of electronics and orchestrations influenced by modern classical composer and jazz pianist Richard Rodney Bennett. By the time of 2013’s extraordinary Field of Reeds – with its beautiful, serpentine songs, Portuguese fado singing, recording of a live hawk swooping across the studio, arrangements so complex that the classical musicians hired to play them apparently balked – people were talking about Jack Barnett in the same breath as Talk Talk’s late mastermind Mark Hollis. That’s partly because Talk Talk’s swansong, Laughing Stock, was one of the few albums to which it seemed to bear even a vague comparison; partly because, like Hollis, Barnett seemed to be engaged in a painstaking personal musical quest that paid zero interest to commercial expectations.

So when considering the possibility that its follow-up might be “the most commercial thing ever”, it’s best to remember that such things are relative. This is, after all, an album that features a guest appearance from David Tibet, mastermind behind the endlessly fascinating post-industrial institution Current 93, on its first single Into the Fire. Nothing says vast mainstream appeal quite like a collab with a man who once started a religious cult dedicated to worshipping the children’s character Noddy and invariably sounds less like he’s singing than incanting prior to conducting a human sacrifice.

These New Puritans: Inside the Rose – video

Still, in a certain light, you can see what George Barnett means. While its three predecessors departed from each other so radically they might as well have been the work of different bands, Inside the Rose feels like a progression from Field of Reeds. The songs still tend to take the scenic route, coming packed with musical ideas – in opener Infinity Vibraphones alone, you get the titular instrument playing a complex, Steve Reich-influenced pattern, strings, a punishing electronic bass pulse, backing vocals that sound inspired by Gregorian chants and drums that feel both militaristic and influenced by the cut-up breaks of drum’n’bass. There’s a distinct sense of a band informed by a desire for musical adventure: “Let this music be a kind of paradise, a kind of nightmare, a kind of I don’t care,” sings Barnett on A-R-P, a particularly lovely shimmer of strings and electronics that unexpectedly slips into rattling 180pm breakbeat in its final minute.

Nevertheless, some of Field of Reeds’ more rococo flourishes have been pared back – no basso profundo opera singers or indeed live birds of prey – leaving the songs, and Jack Barnett’s voice, more room to breathe. The latter is a revelation, largely because, at some point in the last six years, he seems to have learned to sing. The fragility of his buried vocals on Field of Reeds was part of the album’s appeal, but here they’re front and centre: still occasionally too smeared to decipher, but possessed of a powerful, yearning quality unheard in These New Puritans’ output to date.

These New Puritans: Where the Trees Are on Fire – video

They fit with the album’s lyrical theme, which – as far as you can make out – seems to be love. There’s a lot of stuff about abandoning yourself, giving in, not knowing where you’re going, but heading off anyway. It’s possible that Where the Trees Are on Fire is some kind of ecologically minded lament, but the musical backdrop sounds too lush and enveloping and, eventually, as the drums kick in, too euphoric. It’s also, in its own weird way, incredibly catchy: the two cyclical lines of melody burn themselves into your brain, as does the breezy, endlessly repeated guitar hook of Anti-Gravity, or the motif delivered by a clear, chorister-like voice on the largely instrumental closer Six.

If it’s not by any stretch of the imagination “the most commercial thing ever”, Inside the Rose is certainly more direct in its approach than Field of Reeds, but its directness doesn’t preclude a real richness and depth, a willingness to take risks and an ability to collage disparate musical ideas together into a coherent whole. There are moments when you think it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that it might reach a wider audience than These New Puritans have previously captured, but that seems beside the point: it feels less like a lunge for the charts than another stopping point on an increasingly fascinating musical journey.

This week Alexis listened to

DJ Rocca: Penne
One of three pasta-themed tracks of the Italian producer’s new EP, Penne is impressively hard to pin down: breakbeat, acid-y, Sheffield techno-ish bass, 80s boogie synths, jazz flute solo. Miraculously, it all works.

Contributor

Alexis Petridis

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
These New Puritans review – frustratingly unfinished symphonies
The duo’s vast sonic canvases, here expanded with a 16-piece ensemble, are ambitious and cinematic but need focus

Stevie Chick

24, Feb, 2020 @1:42 PM

Article image
Thom Yorke: Anima review – angst, anguish, paranoia and … jokes?
The Radiohead frontman gives a glimpse of his fun side on this intriguing, infuriating solo album. But you’ll have to listen closely

Alexis Petridis

27, Jun, 2019 @2:00 PM

Article image
Aldous Harding: Designer review – cryptic charm and shimmering pop | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
Her lyrics are inscrutable and her vocal and visual stylings eccentric, but Harding’s third album is a thing of beauty

Alexis Petridis

25, Apr, 2019 @11:00 AM

Article image
Black Midi: Schlagenheim review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
This hyped quartet of Brit School graduates deliver some powerful kicks between the clattering, self-satisfied rackets

Alexis Petridis

20, Jun, 2019 @11:00 AM

Article image
Africa Express presents EGOLI review – a collaboration to stir the senses
Damon Albarn’s collective decamp to Johannesburg for a rich and rewarding reminder of the eclecticism of non-western pop

Alexis Petridis

04, Jul, 2019 @12:00 PM

Article image
Kali Malone: All Life Long review – music to blot out the world’s clamour
Returning to the organ-playing that made her name and adding brass and vocals, the Thom Yorke-approved composer revels in the possibilities of her instruments

Alexis Petridis

08, Feb, 2024 @11:30 AM

Article image
FKA twigs: Magdalene review – stifled perfection from pop's poledancing swordfighter
Tahliah Barnett moves further into abstraction on this personal, painstaking and wildly adventurous record

Alexis Petridis

07, Nov, 2019 @12:00 PM

Article image
FKA twigs: Caprisongs review – wild invention let down by weak songs
Darkness turns to light in Tahliah Barnett’s follow-up to 2019 LP Magdalene but, even so, it’s an adventurous but undercharged effort missing hooks and cohesion

Alexis Petridis

13, Jan, 2022 @5:00 PM

Article image
Water From Your Eyes: Everyone’s Crushed review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
Across seven years and several albums this band has been evolving its scattershot sonic collage, and here it feels like they’ve finally found their sound

Alexis Petridis

25, May, 2023 @1:00 PM

Article image
Black Midi: Hellfire review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
From cocktail-lounge piano to thrashing drums, the British prog band make musical handbrake turns that are thrilling but hard to love

Alexis Petridis

14, Jul, 2022 @11:00 AM