Maximo Park

Maximo Park
"Apply Some Pressure"
Release Date: February 22nd 2005
Label: Warp

Artist Site: www.maximopark.com

As pop music continues its descent into the mundane, a new generation of bands is cropping up in basement bars and on scummy stages across the globe to forge ahead in the name of rock & roll. Maximo Park seem to come from the strong tradition of British social realism, of the kind embodied in Sixties black and white films by the brooding presence of an Alan Bates or Albert Finney, as their frustrated and always Northern characters wrestled with an overpowering sense of misanthropy in a world of scant opportunity and snatched furtive sex, usually resulting in unwanted pregnancy and back street abortion.

Actually, despite coming from Newcastle Upon Tyne, Maximo Park do not sing about many of these things - except perhaps the furtive sex. And they certainly don't consciously hark back to the past in the sepia tones of, say, the Smiths. But, there at the center of these tightly-wound songs are biting contemporary takes on familiar feelings of being stuck in a small town and desperately needing to find some energy and sense of relief, just to stay alive.

Maximo Park songs positively vibrate with contained energy, and it is something that more than occasionally spills out. Singer Paul Smith describes the anger behind the songs as a force to drive them forward, ever faster. "It's the same with the live performance," he says. "There is a controlled power that enables you to give the audience something of the feelings you had when you wrote the songs."

It's true, listening to his metaphors for the changeability of the human heart ('The Coast Is Always Changing') and the inability to achieve even basic aims ('Apply Some Pressure'), you will recognize the types of everyday situations and scenarios to which we can all relate.

Claiming to be inspired by no other front men, Paul cuts the intriguing and charismatic character of perhaps a less gawky junior Jarvis Cocker, able to articulate in his own instantly, identifiable voice and effortlessly expand the pop lexicon to include such words as "inertia" and "Limassol", while rhyming a simple line like "I am young and I am lost" with an egg-head couplet like "you respond to my riposte!".

Now Warp are pushing things forward with a band they are viewing as the label's most important pop commodity since they released the trio of singles which propelled Pulp into the mainstream 10 years ago. If all the early indications are correct, they may have uncovered one of the most artfully tuneful acts in recent memory.

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