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The Bravery 'Stir The Blood' (Island) |
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 They haven't exactly moved on, but The Bravery remain pleasingly weird
The Bravery’s second album famously failed to come out over here, despite the band having at one time been neck-and-neck with The Killers
in the new new romantic stakes. While they’ve slipped out of view for
us, (and, indeed, you’ll only be able to buy this album on import for
now) apparently they’ve been doing pretty well in the States, and after
singer Sam Endicott recently came out as the writer of Shakira’s striptease backing track She Wolf’ we were quite looking forward to hearing where The Bravery have gone since we last heard from them.
Read more on the jump
Well, turns out they’ve just stayed as still as Endicott’s jet-black quiff. Their sound remains meets Sisters Of Mercy meets . Which actually is no bad thing, as their big hit ‘An Honest Mistake’ proved, it’s just that when ‘Song For Jacob’ or ‘Adored’ occupy such a similar template, it’s almost self-parodic. Except their Future Sailors shtick isn’t tongue-in-cheek.
This is part of their problem; being so po-faced on songs such as ‘I Have Seen The Future’ makes it almost impossible not to ridicule them (as with Marilyn Manson’s ‘Mechanical Animals’,
the future is apparently filled with rubbish synth-metal). Another one
of their problems is Endicott’s voice, which sounds like a friendless
Gary Numan being pushed on a swing by a stranger; it grates, and when
it reaches new levels of shrillness on ‘Red Hands And White Knuckles’, it tortures.
And yet if you can overlook such stylistic clunkings and immerse
yourself in the ‘Blue Steel’ of Bravery-world, there’s much fun to be
had. ‘Slow Poison’ and ‘Jack-O-Lantern Man’ are Spandau Ballet in their choruses, and New Order in their basslines, and slowies ‘Sugar Pill’ and ‘She’s So Bendable’ add touches of Soft Cell to the obvious aping that we now associate with The Horrors.
Also, Sam Endicott is quite pathological in his imagery, and on this
album casts himself as a masochist who wants to be punished for being a
bad little boy. The nicely unpleasant ‘Hatefuck’ has him squealing, “If I put my fingers in your mouth would you bite them”, while on ‘I Am Your Skin’ he sings “I want to be your skin/I want to feel everything you feel/I want to be your covering”.
Sam Endicott is almost certainly a serial killer and we wouldn’t want
to be his next-door neighbour, but this does mean The Bravery are still
one of the weirdest bands around. They’re out of step, out of time, out
of place, and have completely gone off on one in their own strange
little world; as such, there’s much to admire about The Bravery. Just
never go down to Endicott’s basement.
Martin Robinson
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Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt
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