Music Review
By Daniel Tham
20 October 2006

Britpop has a special place in my heart.

I grew up listening to Blur and Pulp, swaggering along with the bands’ middle-class cockiness without really having tasted what parklife is about nor having sung along with the common people. Britpop children of the 1990s, I am sure you know what I am talking about.

I loved how these British bands reveled in their own Englishness and, of course, I loved their music, which had all the hooks and riffs I would expect of a good British pop song.

Needless to say, I have grown frustrated with what Britpop has turned into today. It seems that just about every other band that has come along since the turn of the century seem to see Coldplay and Franz Ferdinand as the only two models of success in the British music industry. The result is a bland and boring Britpop scene in which every band sounds like just like another.

However, salvation from the creativity drought has arrived in the form of the London-based Guillemots and their strikingly innovative and courageous debut album “Through the Windowpane.”

The record is a coherent one simply because it does not try too hard to be coherent. In fact, the songs do not even sound very much like one another.

The orchestral welcome of opening track “Little Bear” does little in preparing the listener for the multiple trajectories the album diverges into - the naïve and childlike “Made-up Lovesong #43,” the brass-stomping “Trains to Brazil” and the delicately raw “Blue will still be Blue.”

In a funny way, the album’s eclecticism seems to magically string together its many disparate elements. Even more intriguingly, this works despite the various, almost indulgent, excesses the band allows itself to revel in. The ease at which certain genres and moods intertwine and lead to new ones is indeed refreshing, if not startling.

Without bothering to tie themselves down to genre-defining musical references and yet still somehow maintaining their astute pop sensibilities, the talented quartet delivers a masterpiece truly deserving of the Mercury Prize they have been nominated for this year.

In “We’re Here,” lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield sings, “when I can’t move, I’ll savour the pause for a while.” For die-hard Britpop fans, “Through the Windowpane” is indeed the break that we need from a stagnant Britpop music scene and one that we should relish.