1) Hey Modern Days; 2) Echo Chamber; 3) Joy Surrender; 4) It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane; 5) Ain't Too Proud to Bow; 6) Bottleneck Barbiturate; 7) Let Your Body Decide; 8) Patchouli; 9) This Sad Bouquet; 10) Angelheads; 11) Laurel Wreath; 12) You, Who Stole My Solitude
A flamboyant and confident debut, both bolstered and perhaps overshadowed by the inclusion of one truly immortal song.
Key tracks: "Hey Modern Days", "Joy Surrender", "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane"
I don’t like to generalise but I think all of us gay folks (and presumably all non-straight and/or non-cis folks for that matter) end up doing a fair bit of amateur self-psychoanalysis sooner or later in our lives: what were the first signs that we felt different from our peers, when did we feel at odds when comparing to the expected, et cetera. In general I was a late bloomer when it came to dealing with that whole subject properly, but the sudden arrival of The Ark in the early 2000s was probably the first time the topic appeared as a blip on my radar. Their colourful music scored a fair few significant airplay hits at a time when mainstream popularity was the only real way for me to discover new music and I found myself drawn into those songs, but they came with flamboyant performances and frontman Ola Salo’s playfully provocative theatrics, and thus the band were deemed - in the most elementary grade school way possible - gay, and that wasn’t cool to like. I was a nerdy and not particularly outgoing kid in a small city with a very small friends circle and so I was always paranoid about losing what little social interaction I had, and liking The Ark became something I was very cautious to admit: I sheepishly bought the “It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane” single in the first instance so as not to commit myself wholly to the band by way of owning a whole album, because I felt like I needed to have that song around me. I wasn’t exactly fluent in English but knew it far better than most kids my age (thanks PC games!), and even with my limited knowledge of the language there was something in that song that resonated.
Every morning I would see her getting off the bus
The picture never drops, it's like a multicolored snapshot
Stuck in my brain, it kept me sane
For a couple of years, as it drenched my fears
Of becoming like the others
Who become unhappy mothers
And fathers of unhappy kids
And why is that?
'Cause they've forgotten how to play
Or maybe they're afraid to feel ashamed
To seem strange
To seem insane
To gain weight, to seem gay
I'll tell you this:
That it takes a fool to remain sane
In this world all covered up in shame
That’s a hell of a verse, and even as a kid there was something in its proud defiance that spoke to me - and word-dropping “gay” into the whole thing and grabbing that particular subject head-on felt literally rebellious and smashing taboos. Yet in an unexplainable way it felt good and right to hear it, though the reason why wouldn’t properly click until some years later. But I obsessed over the song and to this date it’s very firmly in my pantheon of my favourite songs of all time: Salo’s fearsomely charismatic performance, that absolute killer of a chorus melody, the breathless run-on section demonstrated above where Salo breathlessly abandons all notion of where to split between the verse, bridge and the chorus, and that soaring, triumphant chorus itself where it feels like the world genuinely has no boundaries. They all coalesce into a genuinely life-affirming, resonant and thoroughly evocative anthem: a monster of a pop song.
Nothing on We Are The Ark threatens to top "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane", but the same qualities that make that song so great are still represented throughout the record. In the five years between their debut EP and this record, The Ark had somehow transformed from a group of borderline sullen goths into a gang of endlessly energetic ambassadors of glam rock throwbacks, and they roll in with the fervour of a band reborn and grasping everything precious about their new life: so much of the record is so positively boisterous and aspirationally joyous. The credit to a lot of it goes to Salo, who even this early on was already scouting for a slot in the halls of all-time great frontmen, with his voice and performance radiating with charisma and sheer, complete command of his audience with every wink of the eye or uttered sentence. There's a charm and a quirk to his lyrics as well that helps make him so engaging. I once read them described as incredibly obviously written by someone not native to the language, not because of grammatical errors but because they exhibit a kind of outside-the-box thinking that's definitely not natural but effective exactly because of it: just take a look at the tongue-twister chorus of "Hey Modern Days", the opener that kicks down the doors and writes the ruleset for the rest of the record to follow, from the extravagant whimsy to the sheer strength of the melodies. He's just as memorable when he's more direct as well: "Let Your Body Decide" is the album's definitive "love yourself regardless of who you are" anthem among many but Salo makes the honesty in the message work, and the swirling, moody closer "You, Who Stole My Solitude" is possibly the only song about love I've come across where the narrator is downright angry about finding someone and falling in love ("did you expect a love song?", Salo coyly winks at the camera at the end of the second verse). He's not necessarily a consistently incredible lyricist but he has a language of his own, and it makes a good part of why The Ark were so exciting.
It's worth emphasising the musical aspect of the record as well, as it's the richness of the melodies that makes We Are The Ark such an exciting album, particularly as a debut. The Ark's glam-influenced pop/rock is the kind of thing that aims to be instant by nature, and when you opt to go down that route you have to go in for the kill when it comes to your choruses, harmonies et al. So, they do. With debuts there's often a great temptation to talk about confidence and ambition, of a band wishing to take on the world and proving why their name should be the one to remember. That's certainly the ethos behind We Are The Ark, where each of the songs exist as one big hook in the best possible way, in that the arrangements and melodies genuinely grab: they're genuinely thrilling in a way that plants a smile across one's face through the sheer power of how well those elements are crafted or how they are presented. They make an instant impression and it's almost show-off-y in how The Ark approach that aspect of their writing. That's even the case for the weaker tracks. "Echo Chamber" kind of goes nowhere, "Ain't Too Proud to Bow" is a sass anthem that only really kicks in once the duelling guitar solo begins and leads into the final blown-up chorus where the song stops being a little flat, and "Patchouli" is almost obnoxiously upbeat in its hippy-dippy sunshine handclaps and sax, and yet they still get under my skin and I can groove to them quite willingly. The reason why I don't think as highly of them is because they come across less developed than the other songs: they lack the sense of dynamics and a level of depth the rest of the album has. Salo's still magnificent as always, but a few times around the record it feels like the band as a whole are almost holding themselves back, lest they get too wild. Maybe it's because there was still some element of figuring out what they should be even after a nearly a decade of musical soul-searching, but you compare the incredibly confident takes like "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane" or the dangerous disco swerve of "Let Your Body Decide" that keep you in their grip firmly throughout and compare to them how "Echo Chamber" and "Patchouli" meander through their verses until they get some jolt of life in their chorus, and you can practically feel yourself swaying to avoid falling into the gap between.
Which leads me to tackling the big question of how this hasn't become the kind of favourite-of-all-time, perfect score record you'd expect given its pivotal role in making me question the world around me, and it's honestly because the album as a whole arrived a little late to the party. I finally got hold of the full album a few years later after hearing and buying "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane", once my friends and I had
grown up by a few years and the diversity in music tastes between us had started to show, and it became clear to me
that it was perfectly OK to like things that your friends might not. By the time I finally did get around to hearing We Are The Ark in full, they'd already followed it up with 2002's In Lust We Trust and I bought both albums at the same time, and simply from a compositional point of view that older sibling is above and beyond the debut, and Salo gets downright brilliant lyrically in it. That doesn't make We Are The Ark any weaker per se, and I still haven't even mentioned some of my other big favourites (so I'm cramming them here) such as the dramatic "Joy Surrender" with its angelic walls of sound, the flamboyant and parading "Angelheads" that brings a burst of light into the slightly more downtoned latter half of the record, and the genuinely beautiful "This Sad Bouquet" which shows the band can pull off quiet and intimate if they want to. But In Lust We Trust ended up overshadowing We Are The Ark at the time of purchase and "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane" is an outlier on the album in how strongly it connected with me as a music listener and as a human being, compared to the other songs. Outside that, We Are The Ark is absolutely a great record, and when I simply want some larger-than-life pop songs performed by an extravagant gentleman, this is where I turn for such. At its best makes you feel completeley invincible as you stand on top of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment