The 1975’s fifth studio album was released earlier in October. Being Funny In A Foreign Language takes a pop, cliché, and groovy path to talk about living in society and its implications. The record produced by Jack Antonoff represents a new, more mature moment in the band’s career.
For a group that started as a teen band, The 1975 has undergone many phases. The 1975, the first and self-titled album, and I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It, the second one, talk about being a teenager, smoking, having sex, and all that sorts of things with a young person’s point of view. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships and Notes On A Conditional Form are much more experimental, abandoning the pop pre-molded style from the first albums.
Also, the third and fourth studio records are very — really exceptionally — woke about all of the problems concerning humanity’s future on this planet. From Donald Trump to Greta Thunberg, they make full speeches, criticize oil pollution, and talk about French Situationism with a computerized production, representing their experimentalist activism-for-all phase.
All of that changes in Being Funny In A Foreign Language. Despite still being woke, they allowed themselves to talk about light, less complex themes, such as happiness and love. In a recent interview, Matty Healy, the band’s lead singer, revealed that, after years of trying to capture everything, everywhere, all at once, they finally scaled it down and he was happy about it. The funky and groovy ballads could easily be some aged songs from the 80s. The guitars and saxophones are no news to The 1975, but now they have a much lighter atmosphere.
Still, Matty is very sarcastic and cliché at the same time. It’s not like there is no complexity to the new lyrics — they also talk about sex and doing drugs. But there’s a different, more mature, tone to it. The satirist king of sarcasm and polemical interviews wouldn’t let an album go without bringing some criticism to it: he still discusses surviving in the digital age, political identities, and even pharmaceutical addictions, proving that he is sincere despite what the critics might say.
Also, being a 43-minute album is an upside, in my opinion. Instead of writing a bunch of nonsense songs only to fill up the discography, they chose to make a minimalist, meaningful, short record. Remembering that we’re talking about the band that has a history with extremely long items — a 16-word album title, for example. The move proves that the group is honest and mature enough to take on the challenge of doing less, but with more quality.
I’ve been a fan for over eight years and even got the famous cliché box tattoo on my arm. But, really, who am I to say anything? Here are some of the critics’ reviews of the album:
“Streamlined, focused on heart and not just head, and loaded with big, unironic pop moments. This is their first album in too long to play out like a pleasure and not a chore” – The Guardian
“The 1975 aspire toward sincerity and radicality, to make music that’s actually meaningful” – Pitchfork
“They reassert themselves at the forefront of 2020s pop-rock, fusing together the textures and musical ideas of soft-rock hits from three decades ago with modern sensibilities in a way that sounds instantly familiar, yet distinctively of-the-moment” – Rolling Stone
Being Funny In A Foreign Language explores music with more subtle pleasures than the songs that they used to make back in 2013. It is very danceable and clumsy. For me, what sums it up is that the entire album sounds like an exclamation point. I’m not sure how to explain it, but it just does. If that’s bad or good, it’s up to you. As Pitchfork put it, it’s an honest record, separating The 1975 from their mainstream rock contemporaries.
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