Antics

Ten tracks in forty-three minutes, and most of the record resists subtraction. Next Exit must open: a slow organ figure and a half-sung invitation out of town, the record announcing that it moves toward the light. Evil, Slow Hands and C’mere are the spine, each a short, hard song built on a bass line the song cannot lose without falling. Not Even Jail is the long climb the middle requires, and A Time to Be So Small the diminuendo the close requires. The test bites at two places only. Public Pervert spends its length on a mood Not Even Jail has just stated better, and Length of Love is the least distinct song, a mid-tempo rocker whose loss would cost little; Narc is good and restates Evil’s manner.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: desire in a city as a performance of control, intimacy approached in the vocabulary of surveillance, seduction and escape, and a man who keeps the other person at the length of a pose. Slow Hands and C’mere are courtship sung from behind glass; Evil sets a name with a notorious crime behind it against a love song and lets the collision stand; Not Even Jail sets possession against freedom. The sound discloses more than the words, and is credited fully: the bass carries the warmth and the voice the distance, so the record says, by arrangement and on every track, that the body is more candid than the speaker. What holds it is that Banks’s lyric is oblique by design and often merely odd, and the condition is not argued beyond the stance.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The record rises more often than its reputation for polish suggests. Not Even Jail is the clearest height: a slow build over a drum figure that holds back until the guitars lock and the chant lifts, a dark grandeur reached by withholding. Next Exit’s organ opening has a hushed, almost churchly breadth, and A Time to Be So Small closes on a widening swell. Evil’s chorus is a different elevation, the lift of an exactly set hook over a driving bass. Real height comes about four times in ten. What holds it is the middle of the record, which runs level, and a height that is dark and well made rather than a transport: nothing here reaches the coldest heights of the strongest records of its kind.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The patterns are old and they are present: the night city as a place of temptation and exposure; the seducer and the spy; the flight from the town to the city that Next Exit offers; imprisonment set against freedom in Not Even Jail; the self made small at the close. The seducer is the record’s one figure in many guises, taken up in Evil, Slow Hands and C’mere, and Evil’s refrain gives love and death a single name, “Rosemary”. What holds it is that these are evoked more than built. The city is atmosphere rather than a structure the songs share, the seducer a pose set down between songs, and the name in Evil is used for its shiver and not followed.

Score: 7.3 / 10

The record departs from two inheritances. From the British post-punk the band was charged with copying, Joy Division, the Chameleons, the Comsat Angels, Echo and the Bunnymen, it turns toward clarity, tempo and the single: the bass leads, the songs are shorter, the mix is brighter. From its own first record it turns away from the long, smeared nocturnes toward hooks. That second turn is the stake. A band heard as imitators risked the manner that had made its name, and the dark pop single that resulted is its own accent. What holds it is that a second record which tightens and brightens a first is a known path, and the turn brings no new form and no new sound: the same parts are set in sharper focus.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The form is the interlock: two guitars that rarely double each other, Kessler’s clipped and repeating figures against Banks’s chords, a bass that plays melody rather than root, and drums that drive straight and dry. That interlock carries what the record knows, that the body and the pose speak in different voices; set the songs in a common rock arrangement, bass under guitars and voice on top, and the warmth would go and only the distance remain. The sequence is counted here, once: an organ prologue, three hard songs, a long middle, shorter songs and a closing diminuendo, the record lengthening and slowing as it goes. What holds it is that the songs share one template closely, and the sequence is more a well-ordered set than an arc the songs require.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Return yields chiefly in the arrangement, and it yields a great deal there. Dengler’s bass lines carry counter-melodies that surface only on return, in Evil and C’mere above all; Kessler’s guitar figures turn over against the beat in ways a first hearing takes as plain repetition; Fogarino’s drum patterns look simple and are not. These reward attention for years, and the record has sustained twenty-two years of listening without seeming spent. What holds it is the semantic layer, which yields less: the obliqueness of the words promises depth that repeated hearing tends to find as manner, and when this band’s work is reopened by writers, it is more often the first record that is reopened.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The field is the guitar record of the early 2000s. The intrinsic force lies in a sharpening rather than a reorganisation: the record showed that a dark, bass-led sound drawn from post-punk could be made into the short pop single without losing its darkness. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Antics was a central record of the New York guitar revival of the early 2000s, and the band’s sound of these years passed into British and American bands of the middle of the decade; what is particular to this record is the turn to the dark single, which carried that sound onto the radio and into larger rooms. What holds it is that the lineage descends at least as much from the first record and from the shared British sources.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is wholly intact: the album survives as released, in print and streamed. Presence is steady but not the widest: Slow Hands and Evil remain in circulation and in the band’s live sets, and the record is heard as an album, but it is the lesser heard of the band’s first two. The fabric is in part fixed to its moment: the clean, compressed production and the period’s revival style date it to the middle of the 2000s more plainly than the murk of the first record dates that one. The axis charges a surface tied to its time and a presence below the widest.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and specific. The production, by the band with Peter Katis, is clean and spacious: every part audible, the bass forward where it carries the melody, the drums dry and present, the guitars panned and distinct, so that the interlock is heard as an argument and not a wash. Dengler’s bass lines are the record’s chief craft: the opening of Evil and the figure under C’mere are among the best-made bass parts of their decade. Fogarino’s drumming is tight and inventive within strict limits. What holds it is the voice: Banks’s range is narrow and his deliberate flatness at times becomes monotony. This is accomplished command of a narrow palette rather than mastery that bears the whole weight.

Score: 8.0 / 10

One law governs the whole: the two-guitar interlock, the melodic bass, the dry drums and the distant voice hold from Next Exit to A Time to Be So Small. Take the two most distant elements, the organ hymn that opens Next Exit and the pop drive of Slow Hands: they obey the same law, the bass warm beneath and the voice held apart above. So do the long, slow climb of Not Even Jail and the bright short form of C’mere. No song breaks the record’s rules, and the law covers a change of temperature from dark to bright and of tempo from slow to fast. What holds it is the range: the law is kept across one colour, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as a man’s desires and the poses he takes up to manage them; the couple is held, in the lover addressed from song to song; the city is present as a setting of night, temptation and exposure, and the flight from the town to it is offered at the start. Within that scope the integration is real: the private pose and the public city are one sound. What holds it lowest of the twelve is that the orders held are few and closely joined. Labour, the family, history, the state, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and the city is a backdrop rather than an order of reality the record holds in structure.

Score: 6.9 / 10