In the process that leads to becoming the pop group’s biggest moment, The 1975 have just delivered a vital chapter to reach their goal. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships is a release that is so capricious, puzzling, exhibitionist, subjective and passionate as this universe of relationships online, playlists, random, life, modern, angst, romantic, postureo and political existence hit by a car that wants to, and sometimes succeeds, to portray in their songs. But as the screenshot of our time and as a speaker of an entire generation will be hard to find in this 2018 a disc pop more certain and passionate.
Artist: The 1975
Album: ‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships’
Label: Dirty Hit-Polydor
Rating: 8 out of 10
The british press was not slow to brand it as the answer millennial to Ok Computer. Beyond comparisons misleading and exaggerated, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships has much more in common with More’s Life of Drake, who with the magnum opus of Radiohead: as already did the rapper and vocalist of the canadian, The 1975 dismissed the album format to embrace a concept closest to the playlist. Without order or discretion, unifying, roller coaster stylistic and emotional, the album is a succession of ideas, influences, evidence, outputs tone hits and that tasted better as if it were a list any of Spotify or Apple Music to a disc to use.
Has hits final –“Give Yourself Marsbahis a Try”, “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME” or “Sincerity Is Scary”, to each of which more– round, even kitsch –airs ochenteros “I Couldn’t Be More In Love,” the influence more than anecdotal of The Blue Nile or INXS–, outbursts experimental within an ecosystem pop –“How To Draw/Petrichor” reminiscent of “Idioteque” by Radiohead–, something to share urban –“I Like America & America Likes Me” and the shadow elongated Kanye West– and, above all, a self-confidence out of the ordinary that allows you to combine moments of genius episodes of to the limit of the shame of others. It is this absolute lack of bias, restraint and fear of what people will say making A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships in a work so closely linked to our time and to a conception of millennial music. And of the life.
Mix jazz with pop, adult R&B, gospel, house, tropical, R&B, hip-hop and pop tacky, electronic with AOR, all on a large and uncompromising; and in addition it makes embraced by a few letters of the chaotic, sometimes ridiculously naive, however, to collect the already old tradition of the emo –isolation, loneliness, misunderstanding of the world, fatalism loving…– and adapt successfully to the codes and aesthetics of the present. Right now, within a few months as you will see, it is impossible to resist its charm.
