1) Prayer for the Weekend; 2) The Worrying Kind; 3) Absolutely No Decorum; 4) Little Dysfunk You; 5) New Pollution; 6) Thorazine Corazon; 7) I Pathologize; 8) Death to the Martyrs; 9) All I Want Is You; 10) Gimme Love to Give; 11) Uriel
Something for everyone, on the road to Eurovision. But they've lost their bite.
The Ark were never counter-culture. They liked to flirt with ideas that could make pearl-clutching worryworts squeal, but they were a band comfortably in the mainstream, getting prime airtime and scoring genuine hits. And yet, participating in the Eurovision still felt like a little too much. Granted, Sweden has always taken Eurovision more seriously than most countries and The Ark's glam glitz was a perfect fit for the show, but the band's participation in the grand European song contest in 2007 nonetheless felt like the wrong kind of popularity peak. Maybe if they had had a better song to go along with it it would have felt like a better fit - because lord knows The Ark could crank out a great bombastic pop song - but "The Worrying Kind" is a rackety romp that manages to plod despite trying its hardest to be incredibly perky, and its self-aware camp and cheese come across cheap rather than fun. It's not a very good song, and Europe largely shrugged in agreement as the continent placed The Ark as 18th out of the 24 countries competing in the 2007 finals. Wikipedia reminds me that the points largely came from the surrounding Nordic countries and 35 countries gave it nul points. Ouch.
"The Worrying Kind" isn't directly representative of the album it ended up featuring on, but the same applies for every song on the record. Prayer for the Weekend is like an attempt to be something for everyone, with The Ark changing from outfit to outfit to suit a different crowd. Just take the first half alone: in order of appearance we have a disco hullabaloo, a glam pop stomp, a classic The Ark anthem, a gothic synth pop twist, a straightforward pop/rock get-to-the-chorus hit and a tropical summer jam so sunny it comes with a cocktail umbrella. It's an album without a real sense of identity behind it, except perhaps in that it tries to please every individual in the crowd at least once. It's there where Prayer for the Weekend follows in the steps of "The Worrying Kind": it's a straightforward album where the songs get to the point quickly, and that point is a big belter of a chorus that's most of the time a thoroughly pleasant one. If it doesn't click as a coherent album because of all its disparately styled songs, then think of it more as a collection of potential singles and Eurovision attempts (given the competition's strict three-minute rule, it's easy to spot the candidates the band wrote - and "I Pathologize" should have been the one). That's when it starts making sense
Given all that, it’s unsurprising that Prayer of the Weekend is a hit and miss record, but it’s still staggering how frontloaded it is on its hit department: I'm cold on "The Worrying Kind" and I can give or take "New Pollution", but the rest of the list in that previous paragraph is all varying degrees of great. The horn-punched disco twang of the title track is superb and sounds like an actual party in the recording studio, "Absolutely No Decorum" doesn't invent anything new but it does what The Ark do best and it flies magnificently and effortlessly, "Little Dysfunk You" takes the synthier elements of the previous album and builds a razor sharp cut with it that drives its backbone-rattling drum beat into its gloriously dramatic chorus the likes of which Ola Salo was born to front, and "Thorazine Corazon" steers away from being an airheaded summer jam and instead simply captivates in its ridiculously upbeat nature. Even with the niggles and the incoherent style flips it’s a really great start to the album, but then the inverse is true as well and the album completely crashes towards its end. The bubblegum music theatre extravaganza of "All I Want Is You" and the painfully throwaway gospel clap-along "Gimme Love to Give" are easily the bottom two songs The Ark have ever committed on tape, to the extent that it’s genuinely surprising these are from the same band who made the first three records, and the acoustic closer "Uriel" has some idea to it but it meanders for over five minutes when it really doesn't need to. The album is a water slide that starts with ecstatic twists and turns, mellows a little towards the middle and the closer you get to the end the more you start to realise someone forgot to fill the pool below.
An even bigger shame is that sometime during the recording The Ark have lost their fangs. It's probably too easy to let the album be discoloured by its Eurovision association (and I say this as someone who enjoys watching it yearly, in its own way) but nine times out of ten, going to Eurovision means that you're vying to be the nation’s darlings while making a push for international mass recognition. Prayer for the Weekend is exactly the kind of record that comfortably mingles in that particular crowd, because it’s safe enough for everyone to like. The previous three records had actual attitude, they championed particular topics with pride and meaning, the arrangements had surprises in their hats and aces in their sleeves and the band overall exhibited a certain kind of joy de vivre that they sang out loud with gusto. In comparison, Prayer for the Weekend has ended up a lot more edgeless and vanilla (the generic super market ice cream kind, not the real deal), with songs about sweet nothings. Sometimes with albums that go from place to place you can feel the fun in the studio that the artists had when trying their hand in brand new sounds, but Prayer for the Weekend bears the sound of professional session musicians doing their day job with a careful constraint not to go too wild. The one time you get something off-track is the section in “Death to the Martyrs” where Salo gleefully shouts out “cunt”, but it’s so clunky and ill-fitting in what’s otherwise such a squeaky clean album that it feels like an editing error. Prayer for the Weekend barely sounds like a record made by The Ark, with only Salo’s vocals reminding of the personality the band radiated over the brim in the past. Without him, this could have been a record from any odd band trying to play it safe, and safe just isn’t that exciting.
It would be easy to call Prayer for the Weekend a clear sell-out record but that phrase comes with certain connotations I’m not so keen on, primarily that implies a cynical deal with the devil to get more cash. Even with its polish and facelessness, that’s never been the vibe that Prayer for the Weekend has hinted at. Maybe after the bitter and alienating State of The Ark the band felt they needed to bring back their positivity and hints of their old sound, and it somehow ended up routing them towards a path that ended in Eurovision and a record like this - I’m not certain. But the reason I feel so mixed about is because Prayer for the Weekend isn’t without its genuine strengths and I feel the need to defend it for that. It’s just that they’re mostly all in the beginning and the more you listen to the album, the more ambivalent you come to think about it.
Rating: 6/10
Physical corner: My copy is a standard jewel case + lyrics
affair - some editions of the album come with a sleeve case or a
holographic print to highlight the peacock feather accents, but mine’s
the most basic edition you can get.
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