British Sea Power – Valhalla Dancehall (2011)

Valhalla Dancehall continues British Sea Power’s trend of not blowing me away while not completely alienating me. The problem I have with this band is that everything they’ve done up to this point, Valhalla included, sounds very plain. The songs on this album have nice melodies, especially the guitar melodies, but I don’t think they sell it very well. This is probably because the vocals don’t communicate enough emotion, at least not to me.

This album has the most in common with the band’s 2008 album Do You Like Rock Music? as it seems to be shooting for the same sort of arena-ready rock ‘n’ roll. It’s just guitars all over the place. The vocals and percussion are audible but they play second fiddle to the guitar most of the time

Many British Sea Power songs, though different in various ways, tend to lack much in the way of personality. I would never say all of their songs sound the same, even on this album, on first listen, they all sounded distinct in their own ways. There’s nothing here that really bothers me. British Sea Power are a competent guitar-pop band but that’s it and they don’t do it well enough to keep my attention. It’s well-written stuff, catchy at times, but always seems to want to recede into the background.

A few exceptions:

“Observe the Skies” is extremely catchy, in fact it might be my favorite thing the band has recorded yet. “Who’s in Control” is also a fine song. “Once More Now” is a nice experiment with hazy guitar pop, but at eleven minutes it overstays its welcome by about half its runtime. The song more or less ends around the 7-minute mark and from there it’s just atmospheric echoing that is pretty but doesn’t really do much for me.