Alt-J - This Is All Yours
- Written by Amy Finlayson
How do you follow up a Mercury award-winning album? Especially when a key member of the group leaves? It takes the term ‘difficult second album’ to whole new levels.
So the follow up to 2012’s An Awesome Wave, This Is All Yours, begins and I feel I have stumbled upon a music lesson where the kids are playing about with loop pedals. Although Alt-J have always had an experimental feel about them – a group of guys messing around with sounds and seeing what happens. Say what you like about this band – they don’t sound like anyone else, and when people have been doing this whole music thing for a while now, you’ve got to admire that.
There is something generally heraldic about this album, especially with ‘Nara’ – you almost picture the band as a choir of angels, albeit a sorrowful one. Although it immediately turns from saintly to downright sinfulness with the blissfully filthy ‘Every Other Freckle’ – ‘I want to turn you inside out and lick you like a crisp packet’ – who would of thought that would be a sexy line? I bet it won’t be long before some 'gentlemen' add this to their repertoire of chat up lines! It’s a great song and easy to see why it’s the second single, but it somehow feels disconnected to the rest of the album.
The interludes on An Awesome Wave gave the album something exciting and fresh and nestled beautifully amongst the other tracks. They have put one interlude on this album, although I’m not sure why. Did they feel obliged as they’d started it on the first and felt it was now their party trick? They truly shouldn’t have bothered with this one. Named ‘Garden Of England’ it’s as though you’re having to sit through a recorder rehearsal in the school hall and all it makes you want to do is run back into the playground.
Once you’re free of the school hall you run into a forest and meet the beautiful and haunting ‘Hunger Of The Pine’ – although I personally still have reservations about the Miley Cyrus sample.
Unlike the uplifting nature of the first album, This Is All Yours has rivers of melancholy running through it – it’s an ending rather than a beginning. I like the way that, as with the first album, Alt-J are telling a story – the album has a structure with introductions and interludes, we meet Nara, we leave Nara. But I feel it’s leaving somewhere rather than going somewhere. There is something slightly holding it back. I still however expect great things from this band and believe they will release a blinder of a third album.