1. "I am Hope!" (intro track)
2. Peculiar
3. How 'Bout I Love You More
4. TreeScavengers
5. This Is The Hebrides
6. Tobermory Zoo
7. Death Of A Scientist
8. Your Love, My Gain
9. Casnova At The Weekend
10. My Friend The Addict
11. Len
12. In The Next Life (A Requiem)
I am hope. You are hope. We are hope. This is hope!
And so, This Is Hope, the third album from Hebridean eccentric
Colin MacIntyre, AKA the Mull Historical Society begins. He certainly has a
lot of expectations to live up to: after selling nearly 100,000 copies of his
splendid debut, Loss, then following it up with an album of perfect
indie-pop, the acclaimed Us, not to mention having been signed to new
label B-Unique, the pressure must really be on him.
The first track proper, Peculiar, is in name as in nature. It's about
a 'crazy guy', who met a 'crazy girl', who had a 'crazy son' and then:
it turned out OK, he went crazy again. In places, it also sounds as
though the record is skipping; but then, MacIntyre didn't get where he is today
by not using oddball sound effects. The song eventually morphs from third
into first person: I'm not cool any more: stay with me honey, with a
'la la la la' upbeat singing voice (MacIntyre's own) just below in the mix.
Next comes lead single, and surprise Top 40 hit, How 'Bout I Love You More.
MacIntyre pioneered this track at last year's Reading and Leeds festivals.
It's a joyously upbeat, perfect indie-pop single that bemoans digital culture -
"Why have we got to try?/ Time's on our side/ In these mechanical times".
It ends with a piano/violin part, which is the perfect end to a perfect single.
Next up is the piano-driven lament Treescavengers. This contains the
first reference to his homeland: "there's quiet coming from Scotland".
But it's not so much an ode to his homeland, as a beautifully orchestrated hymn
to internal self-destruction, as the 3rd verse shows: "What's happened in
your life?/ Walls of skin cannot hide/ Afraid of what lies inside/ Hope took
a chance but didn't bite". This is followed by another downbeat song;
unlikely to be a single, but very good indeed - another home-referencing song:
This Is The Hebrides. This is, seemingly, MacIntyre having a go at
American culture. Once again, it's got a perfectly written piano line, and
once again, it verges on lyrical genius: "They found the killer, she prayed
on the weak/ America is pulling the headlines out of me", or "Europe is
falling and I'd strike for anything/ Millipedes racing down America's skin"
Very good indeed. Track 6, Tobermory Zoo is a fast moving guitar-driven
song about knowing "a man with the world in his hands who knows where we
stand". What it's about is not clear, but what is clear is a reference to
a song on Loss, eponymously titled. The line is "Come on and join up
if you can", wheras the line in Loss' Mull Historical Society was
"c'mon and join us, join us now"
The last song in this series of four (having begun with Treescavengers),
which have been very much like the moody parts of Radiohead's last three albums,
only in a more accessible way, is Death Of A Scientist (which is actually
named as Death OŁ A Scienti$t (A vision of man over machine, 2004)').
It's clear that this is MacIntyre's ode to Dr. David Kelly, the government
scientist of recent news. It starts off with quite a dirge-y verse: "A simple
accident of fate/ A quiet hero made a mistake/ I'm the fall guy who fell away",
but then it goes really quite strange (as did the lead single from Us,
The Final Arrears, as it approached its fourth minute): "It's funny
before I lost my control I had clarity love is clear and gentle" - it's
practically a stream of consciousness.
The next verse contains the killer line
"I used to know a man who burned his silly skin against the state",
before the string section of the year kicks in. As the song enters its fourth
minute, a church organ and brass band kicks in, before MacIntyre dramatically
screams 'aaaaaah'. It quietens down again for a moment, and then a sample of
the Gloucestershire news program kicks in. It exerts even more pressure into
and out of the song: it's urgent, but slow at the same time. The song's final
two minutesare MacIntyre claiming "tonight I'll fight for this life... and
clocks tick and transport clucks, and blood still flows around bodies".
It's a song similar to MacIntyre's previous political statements: "Barcode
Bypass" (about a supermarket which puts a cornershop out of business, and
the corner shop owner takes an overdose - admittedly an oblique reference, but
it works), and Minister for Genetics And Insurance M.P. - a song about
a depressed M.P..
As that song ends, you practically feel like you are driving past a sign: "You
are now leaving the expermental phase...", which is a shame, because it's
begun to grow pon you. No worries, as MacIntyre follows with two brilliant
pop-songs - Your Love, My Gain and Casanova At The Weekend, the
latter of which is as darkly perky as anything the Society has ever recorded.
Following on, is My Friend The Addict, which eventually gets the
mysterious instrumental that the title suggests it should have, but not without
surprisingly upbeat choruses and Coldplay-esque verses.
And then there's Len -
another song which is upbeat on the exterior, but it talks about having
"done nothing wrong on a world scale" - suggesting that a) whoever
Len is, he's not as bad as those who do something wrong on a world scale (given
MacIntyre's earlier statements on the record, this is perhaps George W. Bush),
or b) that it's alright to do something wrong, as long as it's not too
bad, which would be a delicious stroke of irony given that this is the most
experimenetal Mull Historical Society album so far.
We end with In The Next Life (A Requiem), a grandmother-sampling ode to
"the end" - one assumes the end of life. If this song fears death, then the
instrumentation certainly does a good job of hiding it - a simple piano riff
is joined eventually by a happy drum beat, all the while the New Orleans Singers
wait in the wings, knowing that they could join the song at any moment.
This certainly isn't the same Mull Historical Society as on the last two
albums, but times change. This is a brilliant record in many ways.
Experimental yes, but something did have to be done. Whilst MacIntyre was
creating some of the best records of the decade, he wasn't selling many.
Hence a change of label, and a slight change of direction. There's enough
here for long-term fans, as well as enough to sell a fair few records to
new fans whilst at it. It's also a great record musically. Some might say
over-produced, but that is the beauty of Mull Historical Society's
charm – using a variety of instruments to the advantage of his records.
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
