Metronomy performs at the Royale on February 3, 2020! Hey, did you
ever notice how Metronomy, the Joe Mount-fronted electronic indie pop
group releasing their sixth album Metronomy Forever this September,
sounds a bit like time keeping tool ‘metronome’? You did? Boy oh
boy. The metronome reference was but a musical in-joke before: now it
contains more meaning. The steady tick-tocking of the pendulum
represents continuation, stability, endlessness, and consistent
familiarity. It understands that while we all ultimately return to the
goo from whence we came, time marches on furiously, like a bull aiming
for a matador. Your last breath will be another click on the machine.
Metronomy Forever in name represents a similar ethos: something
looking backwards and forwards simultaneously, like Janus, something
fated and eternal. You were made from dust and to dust you will
return, that sort of thing. “What happens is when you’re making
music and you enter a world where you have achieved some sort of
celebrity no matter how large or small you start to think about
yourself in terms of legacy and what you’re going to leave
behind,” says Mount. “And then you realise that’s limited to the
interest people have in you. In the end I feel completely comfortable
with it. The less importance you place in any art the more interesting
it can become in a way… I’m making music, I’m going to do some
concerts, I need to feed my children.” Metronomy Forever is the
follow-up to 2016’s Summer 08, and contains 17 tracks. Its length is
born from a desire for breathing room, from not wanting to stuff the
hits together like a bouquet of petrol station roses. In between the
sauna-sweat-soaked funk of songs like It’s Automatic, and the beach
funeral of Walking In The Dark, lie pretty, glistening ambient tracks.
It evokes the feeling of being sat in a nursing home,
Swiss-cheese-brained, recalling joyous flashes of a past life while
the fugue states of comforting confusion wash over you. It also comes
from a desire to replicate the feeling of listening to the radio, with
sumptuous songs of different types and styles helping lighten your
mood, and stifle retches as you inhale scrambled egg steam from the
saucepan you’re scrubbing. “The radio never stops,” as Joe puts
it. “It doesn’t really matter how emotionally deep the music that
comes on is, it’s entirely your situation that gives the music
it’s emotional leaning.” “For so long I was concentrating on
trying to make these snappy songs, and when they were all sat together
it didn’t make for some impressive thing. It wasn’t until I
started thinking about the past several years, realising that in that
time there’ve been periods of drifting, and looking around for
ideas. When I started including these bits of instrumental music and
bits of sound, to which I genuinely felt some kind of connection, I
put them in amongst these little flowers.” Flowers are apt metaphor.
Mount has moved away from the bustle of his former Parisian home to
take up residence atop a hill in the garden of England. It was a
necessary change, he says, and one that has soldered a bond with him
and nature. “I think it has everything to do with me at the moment,
being in this environment – and I literally mean the environment. I
feel properly more connected with nature. And I’m embracing myself
getting into it, because I think it’s a really important part of
being a person – and I haven’t even read that Sapiens book.” And
a good thing he hasn’t, as it seems Sapiens has been widely
discredited by academics the world over. Metronomy Forever is a record
that exudes a green tranquillity. Mount was concerned that the
relative happiness of his existence might stifle his creativity,
having no great tragedy to draw from, but discovered the opposite was
true. “To be jealous of having that stuff going on is a bit
dangerous,” he says. “I look at successful musicians who, as they
get older, struggle to remain relevant. I’m at this point where I
feel like, my attitude towards what I do is healthy. With this record
I wanted to make a very pure expression of what I’m about right now,
and I think for me that makes for better music.” And while the music
itself promotes a sense of calm joy, it’s in the lyrics that we
remember that even idyllic circumstances require their own
maintenance, an oiling of the cogs to keep them crunching along. Mount
reminds us of this on Lately, desperately singing “That is love and
it's hard to do, it's a job for two. What do I do if I don't get
nothing from you?” It’s not just the physical space and distance
from stress and life on the Rue De Dogshit in the French capital that
has had its effect on the creative process. Mount spent much of the
last four years working with Robyn on her acclaimed and deeply
personal record Honey. 48 months of vicarious agony was exhausting,
but ultimately extremely fulfilling. “In the space of time since the
last Metronomy record I’ve had a very large part in writing an album
based on a traumatic experience for her. I knew the whole experience
was going to be this massive cathartic thing. When it got to the point
of finishing, I remember telling her how good it was and how people
are really going to respond to it in the way you want them to. Working
with someone and being able to tell someone that is quite an enjoyable
thing, being able to know that everything’s cool. It’s a nice
feeling to have.” Those glimmers of emotional, intense, carnal mania
seem to have rubbed off on Mount in their own way, too. On Sex Emoji,
the subconscious throbbing purple of the erotic digitised aubergine
comes to life, a refrain of ‘love, honey, sex, money’ sang in a
coital squeal. Salted Caramel Ice Cream brings this to the fore too,
but more in the vein of Lipps Inc’s Funkytown, and evokes the sapid
pleasure and delights of love, but also the panics and anxieties
(‘Oh god, she’s coming, don’t look up’). But when the shagging
is over you’re left only with the despair of your sweaty reflection.
The moments of pain and sadness on Metronomy Forever are just as real,
but also surmountable, much like most of the torture of existence
ultimately is. It’s the scope of experience of someone who has
decided that agony, while perhaps a good palette from which to scrape
your paints, is just not really that much fun. We’re here for a good
time, not a long time, and, as Homer Simpson once said, “You could
wake up dead tomorrow.” Get on your hands and knees, plunge your
fingers in the soil and scream thanks at the moon for making the waves
crash warm foam at the feet of our children.
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04/02/2020 Last update