Review Summary: The Scots' fifth album is more Depeche Mode than Biffy Clyro, with mixed results.
Twin Atlantic aren’t the first modern rock band to shy away from guitars. Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco have replaced distortion with vocal acrobatics and funky percussion, while fellow Brits You Me At Six went fully electronic on latest single Our House (The Mess We Made).
It’s true rock music ain’t burning up the charts, but it’s particularly odd in this case after the Scots’ previous album – GLA – had fuzzy riffs front and centre. The catchy No Sleep sounded like Ocean Colour Scene’s Riverboat Song twenty years on, and Gold Elephant: Cherry Alligator was the loudest they’d shouted in years. What gives?
Electronic drums, vocal samples and chunky synths kick POWER off on Oh! Euphoria! They aren’t outliers: this is an electropop album influenced more by Depeche Mode than Biffy Clyro. The band even noodle around with soundscapes on Mount Bungo and Asynchronous, two instrumentals on what is already a tightly packed record at just over 34 minutes long. Regardless of the why, they commit to whatever POWER is.
On centrepiece I Feel It Too, it’s a successful experiment. Twin’s trademark jaggedness is fused perfectly with their electronic dabbling on this sprinter of a track. It’s not as sexy as its “use my body and know somebody out there’s loving you” refrain wants it to be, but it has the energy of a rock band with new toys. Novocaine is bouncy and anthemic, using the genre leap to accentuate what worked in some of the band’s biggest and more mainstream hits.
They wander too far in the wrong direction on Barcelona and Praise Me. The former comes dangerously close to something NME would adore from the mid-2000s, its whiny chorus particularly limp and lifeless, while the latter shows how close POWER could have been to an Imagine Dragons rip-off. Volcano falls somewhere in-between, its glitzy disco beat either an affable quirk or a step too far, depending on how the rest of the album’s going down for you.
Then there’s Ultraviolet Truth. Take away Sam McTrusty’s Scottish lilt and you’d be forgiven for expecting Dave Gahan to start crooning about enjoying the silence. It’s a more mature track lyrically too, of someone talking to a younger version of themselves saying they’ll come out the other side of what they’re going through, but the almost gothic tinges emphasise the struggle, making it more than your average ‘things will be okay’ rousing rocker.
POWER might only make sense in retrospect. Is it something the Twin Atlantic boys had to get out of their system, or is this it for them? There’s enough here to suggest they could put together a collection of edgy electronica, but there’s also evidence it could result in a damp thud, where they lose their spark entirely in exchange for radio friendly singalongs that make Bastille sound like Blood Incantation. Let’s hope they keep the fire.
