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In a parallel universe—one the place indie rock reigns supreme and frequently seeks out poets of deadpan absurdism—critics are already celebrating So Medieval like a promising novelist’s debut splash. The blurb touts “a story of musical ambition and romantic anguish, informed by continental capers involving uncooked halloumi, a Method One audiobook, and the ‘shitpost sagas’ of once-in-a-generation voice Arthur Nolan.” Our expectations are pegged to Blue Flexible’s chatty UK friends—Dry Cleansing, Squid, et al.—then sharply raised as we be taught the band has “coined a formally daring new language,” maybe positioned “between the indie disco and the subsequent morning’s social media scroll.” Emblazoned on the again cowl of this literary-musical opus are quotes from Jarvis Cocker, Yung Lean, and for some purpose Zadie Smith.
In actuality, the vagaries of hype have principally eluded this London-via-Scunthorpe band, which says a little bit about their admittedly area of interest enchantment and a little bit extra concerning the British music media’s imperiled hype equipment. Fortunately, the shortage of precise acclaim has executed nothing to discourage Nolan from flooding his songs with gnomic brags, eccentric alter egos, and the non sequiturs which might be his crazy lingua franca. Blue Flexible’s debut EP, 2022’s Motorcycle, was two years late for the critics’ anointing of monologue-rock darlings, however unified simply sufficient inputs to really feel dizzyingly new: handclap indie-pop swarmed by Warp-inspired synth ad-libs and a preponderance of too-online slang. Fretting he is perhaps “the one one swagging within the deep,” in a world “powered by Unreal Engine,” Nolan introduced a persona akin to the Wedding ceremony Current’s David Gedge getting initiated into Drain Gang throughout a sport of Fortnite Squads.
With So Medieval, Blue Flexible return to the province of realism, utilizing their underdog standing as a springboard to defiant, high-stakes art-rock. The story loosely follows a “memelord kind” narrator throwing all of it in for the band after a tough breakup. His chronicles of distress and mischief can rise to emotional rapture (Nolan calls this “dying on the mic”) or plunge into endearing hysteria, as on “Mr. Bubblegum”: “I can deal with being the third-best guitar band in London,” he cries, “however child, simply let me be first at one thing.” Neither the melodrama nor the hubris are misplaced on the 27-year-old frontman, who takes a second, on “I’m Sorry I Left Him to Bleed,” to reassure us he’s in on the joke: “I’ll get higher by some means/However for now I’m simply the boy/You made really feel like Kendall Roy—wow.”
When he’s not wowing his personal zingers, Nolan writes touchingly about life in a band seized by music’s contradictory calls for: Success is vital as a result of it enables you to make extra artwork; artwork is vital as a result of it has nothing to do with success. On “Cloudy,” Nolan dramatizes the grind by a collection of absurd quibbles (“I’ve bought beef with a monkey account”) and indignant pleas (“We’ve been struggling for miles/The place are my memetic flowers?”) in a tone so relentlessly foolish you sense he’s desperately severe. The band sounds embroiled in the identical scrap for a shot at majesty, sharing the Black Nation, New Street playbook of minimalist-classical hooks scaled for folk-pop magnitude. The dear and grandiose converge all through the album, every half a foil to Nolan’s twin character. Guitarists Joe Nash and Harrison Charles slingshot between folksy humility and post-rock gusto, whereas synth whiz Olivia Morgan alternates sly Stereolab filigree with baroque-pop extravagance.
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