Everything Everything - A Fever Dream

A Fever Dream
Everything Everything
Tiger Rating: 7.5 / 10
Maths Rock

On their fourth album Everything Everything remain as frantic, quirky and, most importantly, relevant as ever. If you bother to decipher their lyrics.

The music scene is changing. Like an 80s coming of age comedy, the geeks are getting the limelight whilst the former cool kids are aging terribly and fading away into sedate domestic oblivion.

Manc geek maximalists Everything Everything are the saviors of modern indie.
On their fourth album they remain as frantic, quirky and, most importantly, relevant as ever.
The targets of their ire, as ever, are politicians and people in power. However, as per norm, their precise beef is veiled beneath poetry and vague analogies - grotesque caricatures in a surreal landscape. This is the band, after all, whose last summer banger was about fat children in push chairs (again a veiled stab at society on the dole). Just know that they're angry about Brexit and Trump.

Their personal musical philosophy seems to literally be 'everything everything' all the time.
Lead singer Jonathan Higg's falsetto is more Michael Jacksonesque as ever, as it slides around beneath disco rhythms like a python in silk sheets on 'Night of Long Knives'. Elsewhere savage synths drive 'Desire' - easily the best track on the album. It's both catchy and melodramatic AF, which pretty much sums the band up. First single 'Can't Do' is a vague attempt at early 90s house, with the dance rhythm played on guitar as opposed to keys. It works, and recalls the stock they're bred from (Foals / The Maccabees / Friendly Fires).
'Big Game' starts and ends as a brooding lament, with some of the heaviest guitar stabs this side of Muse making the filling of the sandwich.

They whip up a foamy mouthed frenzy in an extended, dizzying refrain on 'Ivory Tower' (three guesses what that's about) before coming to their understandably jaded and exhausted conclusion on post-apocalyptic album closer 'White Whale'.

'A Fever Dream' is no easy listen. It demands your attention, especially given the band's prediliction to grand, dramatic, rock opera proportions.
They confront the human condition with unflinching tenacity, and perhaps it's this that really sets the band apart form their contemporaries. In an age where headlines can be so shocking and devastating, they are offering no simple solutions, no escapism and ultimately no fear in facing the facts.
In one simple chord transition from major to minor on the last few bars of the last song, you realize the true message of what they've constructed here.
Nothing lasts forever, and that is true for all the wrongness in the world right now.
WVS