Week 9: "Valhalla Dancehall" By British Sea Power

The band, “British Sea Power.” The Album, “Valhalla Dancehall.” 

…What?

           My thoughts exactly when I stumbled across this album on Monday at my local Barnes & Nobel.

I want to say that this album completely blew me away and is now on my top ten list but I can’t. Not to say that this is a bad album by any means, it does what it means to do and it does just that. Mixing the sound of The Killers with The Cure and a little bit more electronic programming, BSP brings “Valhalla Dancehall” to the table in early 2011. Even though this review starts on a sour note with the band please don’t take it in anyway that BSP is a terrible band, there just was not much to me in the album that would keep me returning to it.

     “Valhalla Dancehall” can rock, and it can be chill…for a band this genre, they are fairly versatile. That seems to be a little uncommon with the “British pop-rock” genre, at least to my knowledge. All these combinations of musical enhancements on their songs never really leave the set genre that they claim to be so there is no real…expanding with their music. “Valhalla Dancehall” is, however, filled with loads of catchy hooks and melodies that will bring back the right listener time and time again. A big catching point in this record with me is that this is that a lot of the tracks are very huge sounding with spacey pads and overdriven delays. So there are a lot of learning that can be taken from listening to effects and postproduction sounds.
      I say all this to say again that this British pop rock band is just that. If that is what you like then this album will not disappoint fans of bands like The Killers, Franz Ferdinand. But BSP is not a mainstream sounding band so if you are uncomfortable listening to new and different music, stick to what you know.


NEXT WEEK!
An Horse - Rearrange Beds (2009)

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