Now four years since the watershed magazine covers featuring Brett from Suede alongside headlines such as "Yanks Go Home," several of the top Britpop bands are allowing American sounds once again to sneak back into their musical vocabularies. First Blur disavowed their Britpop moniker and now Supergrass return with an outstanding sophomore album that likewise disregards the parochial Britishness so vital to the original foundations of the recent British music scene.
Of course, Supergrass never tried to mimick the Small Faces or Madness in the first place, leaning more towards 70s party music and their own inimitable sense of fun. Their seminal contribution to the soundtrack of the 90s, "Alright," was as easily compared to Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" as to anything else.
Supergrass can shake, rattle, and roll without dogmatically invoking English cultural cliches (Mansun, Menswear) or slavishly pursuing European bands trying to sound like US West Coast rock (Reef, Bush). So that even though the latest single, "Richard III," features Smashing Pumpkins-style vocals and "Tonight" uses Sonic Youth guitars, the literary title of the former and the playful melodic sense of the latter (not to mention horn sections) will assure anyone of the band's roots.
In addition to their admiral universality, Supergrass also happen to write terrific songs. The first single, "Going Out," though not as fast as earlier hits like "Mansize Rooster" or "Caught By The Fuzz," is a good example: a calliope organ swirls into a driving beat, a relaxed bass line limits any drift towards chaos, a melodic bridge is filled with horns, and Gaz sings with an unbridled voice, a voice best described as a cross between Supertramp and Mudhoney (though perhaps with a bit of Gary Numan and Cheap Trick thrown in for good measure).
"Hollow Little Reign," "Late In The Day," and "Cheapskate" have loping beats, somewhere between "Ob-La-Di" and ska, while "Sometimes I Make You Sad" uses a human beat box ala Fat Boys in lieu of bass. On "Sun Hits The Sky," they add a New Wave synthesizer and bongos.
What's outstanding about In It For The Money is the abundance of vocal melodies. The backdrops, while also good, are almost immaterial when attached to such a wonderful array of great ideas from Gaz. His vocal lines distinguish a "Richard III" from the two-chord rockers of dozens of other up-and-coming bands. And naturally, the vocal lines are the reason this record, like the first, instills the listener with an urge to sing along.
Supergrass are by turns zany, comic, touching, and insightful. But they remain perpetually melodic without any signs of the cloying Victorian music hall sensibility that may have made Blur (on Parklife or The Great Escape) or other Britpop headliners disconcerting to audiences west of Ireland. For people who wish Weezer or Nada Surf could play with might and melody but not utilize funny glasses or a lack of social prowess as their primary lyrical conceit, Supergrass demonstrate that, in Britain at least, melody need not be a consolation prize.
