Retrospective Album Review - The Big Pink, A Brief History of Love

The Big Pink seem to have died a death since that seemingly endless stint in 2009 when mega-single Dominos was everywhere – on TV, on the radio, in Xbox ads. The ubiquity of this song had a significant part to play in why I let them pass me by at the time – I wasn’t overly keen on its simplistic, repetitive hook and lyrics that sounded from a parenthetical hearing to be nothing more than laddish posing. And, naturally, when a song’s being played on Radio 1 five times a day, it gains a particular vacuous air that makes forming any sort of meaningful connection difficult.

So it’s quite odd that I’ve suddenly found myself listening to A Brief History of Love over and over for the past couple of weeks. My awareness was revived when I noticed distinct parallels between contemporary pop robot Charli XCX’s Boom Clap and The Big Pink’s Velvet (the only song I found particularly exciting during their world-conquering phase).

However, while Charli XCX maintains a completely po-faced reliance on that artificial, impactful beat, The Big Pink employ it in a very self-aware juxtaposition with Robbie Furze’s bruised delivery, a mechanical churning underneath impassioned, heartfelt verses. Velvet also exhibits a hypnotic, almost limitless building quality, in the same vein as Radiohead’s Let Down, that offers it up as a real example of classic 21st century songwriting.

Lyrically, that song sums up much of the album – ‘These arms of mine don’t mind who they hold, so should I maybe just leave love alone’. The album’s called A Brief History of Love, there’s also a song called A Brief History of Love. The Big Pink very nearly match The Beatles’ six hundred-and-odd uses of the word ‘love’ on this one album. It’s unclear whether this qualifies it as a concept album, or it was mere coincidence that the best eleven songs the band produced at the time had such a strong thematic link.

This collection, though, scarcely finds the duo in celebratory mood. On Dominos and Tonight, Furze is an unsympathetic womaniser, but one completely aware of the effects of his actions both on others, and on his own sense of perpetual hollowness. This explains the repetitiousness of Dominos, and Furze’s dispassionate delivery as he adjusts to the inevitability that his current path will lead to nothing but more heartache, unable to change course.

Love in Vain finds him on the receiving end, having to deal with an unfaithful partner. But the cold outlook remains as he offers his lover an ultimatum – ‘If you really love him, tell me that you love him again and go’. That last command is tacked on after a long pause, almost an afterthought. Furze sounds battered and bruised, and that basically seems to be his default setting. Maybe he should leave love alone, poor chap.

Even when the music crafts a more uplifting vigour, as in At War With the Sun, Furze sounds more relieved than satisfied, a man exhibiting the distinct kind of elation that comes with realising the wearisome nature of certain responsibilities and abandoning these. This feeling runs through all of the album’s more energetic tracks to some degree, in particular Golden Pendulum and the wonderfully Pixies-esque Countbackwards from Ten, which caps the whole record in textbook manner by stripping away most of the electronic whirrs and fizz, and bringing out the acoustic guitar. Thematically, too, this very much feels like the end credits, (in)complete with an ambiguous fade-to-white as the speaker contemplates whether he’s ‘better off dead’.

Just over five years on, it’s possible to see the legacy of The Big Pink in certain parts of the musical sphere. Whether this is coincidence is impossible to state, but in this band, one can see the seeds of both the black-and-white cinematic swoon of The 1975, and Peace’s waifish bounce. But The Big Pink did both much more effectively, and with a masterfully calculated swagger that made mass appeal pretty much assured.

Much like The XX indirectly made it easier for acts such as Lorde, James Blake and Alt-J to achieve mainstream success, simply by channelling an eclectic range of influences into something original at a time when indie music was relatively stagnant, The Big Pink were arguably trailblazers of a fashion. Their debut even mirrors The XX’s in some respects, delicately balancing the private and anonymous with the kinetic and the expansive. And while their patchy second album, which tried to fit the industrial strut of Dominos with preachy, overly sincere lyrics about staying golden, may have in part engineered their fall from grace, A Brief History of Love stands as an unconventional, exceptional piece of work.