The Maccabees are Still Lost in the Wild on Latest Single

The Maccabees feel almost like elder statesmen nowadays, having honed a certain brand of indie pop ideal for any kind of scene the Skins soundtrackers needed audio accompaniment for. They’ve kept a low profile, but have been omnipresent to a relatively weighty fan base for some time since songs like Toothpaste Kisses struck a chord with lovesick youngsters who wanted to dance while they moped.

New song Marks to Prove It is, in some ways, the classic comeback single, the band looking to throw off the heavy, rust-coloured shroud of previous album Given to the Wild and jump feet first through a wall of rumbling bass notes and feedback.

The opening reintroduces the scratchy guitars of the band’s debut, but with the more nuanced production of later albums, essentially resulting in a less claustrophobic, more measured take on X-Ray. The chorus follows along the same lines, a huge swell of noise, but with a degree of polish, backed up by Orlando Weeks’ smooth, restrained delivery and some spacious backing vocals.

Weeks seems to be taking aim at social media junkies who feel compelled to document every aspect of their lives, uploading endless holiday snaps and moaning about the weather: ‘Clouds and rain and no one cares, ‘cause they’ve got the marks to prove it’.

Marks to Prove It finds some room to be quirky in its four minute duration, with a couple of sharp tempo changes where the song drops to a canter that sounds simultaneously jolly and melancholy (melan-jolly?), in typical Maccabees fashion. One of these changes is accompanied by an eerie funhouse keyboard that is later seamlessly layered into the frenetic noise of the rest of the song.

The smoothness of this transition, however, is symptomatic of what some may see as a worrying sign – Marks to Prove It is noisy, sure, but it really lacks any sense of dynamism, cribbing the shapeless loud-LOUDER haze of mainstream pop music, with heavy slabs of guitar and synth chords forming an indistinct muddle throughout.

The song sounds like a Big Song, but it also sounds as if that’s exactly what the band aimed for and, perhaps, tried a bit too hard to attain following the expansive, cohesive, but ultimately killer single-lacking, Given to the Wild.

While Marks to Prove It is propulsive, carried along by typically on-point drumming from Sam Doyle, it sounds a little flat and muddy, with The Maccabees clearly not fully ready to leave the wild from which their previous effort came. Who can blame them? That album was fucking great.