REVIEW: Gene, Olympian (A&M)
- Tim Mohr
There are a number of endearing qualities about Gene, most of which can be garnered from listening to their debut album, Olympian. The album, like the three U.K. singles before, is starkly different from most of the other British bands that have been hyped during the past year. For one thing, unlike Echobelly, Elastica, and Sleeper, Gene is not fronted by a woman. For another, the music that Gene generates is not at all high octane, instead winding through docile melodies with a tenderness not often found in a musical neighborhood ruled by Oasis. Still, Gene has gotten a lot of press coverage, largely positive, and the band may represent a continuation of a lineage sired by the Auteurs - one of the first bands championed by the British press as part of the continuing renaissance in British pop and rock.
Olympian is fundamentally good, but perhaps the easiest way to describe it is to bring up a few complaints rather than a list of hyperbolic compliments. The frugal production means that all the minor faults of Gene remain detectable; that said, the sonic honesty is more than tolerable since, for the most part, Gene is charming even without dense studio make-up.
Singer Martin Rossiter still sounds a bit tentative at times, quietly flailing in a brittle vibrato, though this is worst on "Sleep Well Tonight," a single which was recorded earlier than the album material. Occasionally, Gene seems to have come up with a great chorus and then struggled to fill in the verses with much of musical interest. This pattern is most recognizable on the album's lead single, "Haunted By You," where a monotonous percussion line is initially rather invasive. The swinging chorus is repeated endlessly, however, and the choppy opening fades from mind after five or six repetitions of the chorus. "Truth Rest Your Head" has a similar structure, with the song essentially consisting of two separate parts: a couple of musically forgettable verses, then a tuneful chorus that is repeated ad infinitum. Criticizing songs on the basis of dependence on the chorus may be unwarranted: REM scored their first hit with "The One I Love," an extremely unambitious song when judged on such a basis.
The highlights of Olympian far outweigh the flaws. The chorus of the bisected "Truth Rest Your Head," after all, manages to induce finger- snapping and Morrissey-esque hip swivels. And most of the songs are put together much more handily. The dynamic range is more varied than on a Morrissey record, as Gene sometimes adopts a tame version of the soft bit/loud catharctic bit that Nirvana made so popular. The loud, unpolished guitars that occasionally break across the basically calm Olympian beach add a welcome dimension to a band pursuing a potentially mopey, post-Smiths agenda.
Lyrically, Gene steers away from the maudlin depths sometimes plumbed by Morrissey while shying from the shameless novelties used by Suede. Rather than swaggering around like Oasis, the band laments the violent climate of England's yob-tinged youth culture on "Sleep Well Tonight": "Yet trouble has sprung from the pubs and the clubs/We'll see blood soon, when the night's through...And sleep well tonight/Tomorrow we fight, would you like it in town?"
Gene evokes fairly obvious musical references without being trapped by them. Gene is often referred to in the same breath as the Smiths, a connection not dispelled by the fact that the band name derives from a misspelling of a Smiths' b-side, "Jeane". In fact, Gene do not sound overly derivitive, and fans of mid-tempo guitar pop will hum along with Olympian without being hit over the head with influences; the album is not limited to a dogmatic restatement of received history, and represents instead a new take on familiar musical themes. For people who like the Smiths/Morrissey, the Connells, the Auteurs, the Ocean Blue or other restrained guitar pop, Gene's version of it well worth trying.
