Pushing the Senses

Question: Why do so many rock bands take the tradesman’s entrance these days? And when was it they became so self-referential, self-effacing, heterogeneous, monosexual; cut off from the tributary streams of the other arts, adopting forelock tugging as a stance? What happened to glamour, decadence, risk, dandyism, wit? The idea of the pop star as alien emissary, queer weirdo, sin-eater, beautiful freak?
In Ireland, Britain and the US, recent seasons have brought a prevailing cult of mediocrity in the form of acts such as Paddy Casey and Keane and Embrace and Maroon 5, individuals in the full bloom of youth who play like stooped old dullards in grey flannels. All the young dudes, hung up on the importance of being earnest, nothing to declare, least of all their genius. Strip away even Scissor Sisters’ greasepaint flagrance and you’ll find a canon of Elton John piano man ballads.
This is, I admit, a lot of context to heap upon such a humble artefact as the fifth Feeder album. But that’s part of the problem - the humbleness (as distinct from humility) of it all. It may seem unfair to hoist Grant Nicholas and his comrades by their contemporaries’ petards, but the trio are certainly emblematic of the soft rock consensus, the many welders’ apprentices on the circuit who take as their patron saints not Against Nature’s Des Esseintes or Performance’s Turner, but Boxer from Animal Farm, confusing perspiration with imagination, muttering his doomed mantra of I-must-work-harder.
Pushing The Senses is the result of three generations of common denominator rock orthodoxy, from Lennon and McCartney to Teenage Fanclub to Coldplay. In other words, English MOR derived from American emo. Here are songs for sensitive Iron Johns, each set to a standard template: the stately piano confessional (‘Frequency’, ‘Pain On Pain’); the full-tilt but strangely hygienic rocker (the title tune, ‘Pilgrim Soul’); the brooding bassline mood piece (‘Morning Life’, ‘Dove Grey Sands’).
Elsewhere, the single ‘Tumble And Fall’ is another variation on the kind of heartsick plod so beloved of Keane and Snow Patrol, replete with a ‘Creep’ pre-chorus guitar steal that should’ve been weeded out in the earliest rehearsals. Such music is so weary-sounding, so mid-tempo, mid-range and prematurely middle-aged, it can make you wish

The Beatles had never met. The upshot of it all is an efficiently executed collection of conventional rock songs, an album that could’ve been made in any airless recording studio, anywhere on the planet, with only Gil Norton’s digital clarity marking it out as a product of the age. Consequently, the songs lack any whiff of period or location. There’s no sense of event, of epiphany, of oh-my-god-this-is-really-happening, just a straightforward, stalwart, honest day’s work.
In other words, good enough, which is never good enough.