Review: Notes On A Conditional Form

Don't get me wrong, I love The 1975, they're the first band I saw headline a festival, I Like It When You Sleep... is a fantastic pop-rock album and A Brief Inquiry showcases some fantastic songwriting capabilities and exploration away from standard pop-punk, but on first listen to Notes On A Conditional Form, all I could think was 'We waited over a year after this was supposed to be released for a bloated mess'. It takes 6 tracks before you get to a song that isn't an instrumental interlude (quite why there's an interlude on track 3 and why it's titled 'The End (Music For Cars)' when it's the beginning of the album beats me) or pre-release single and by that point it's the pointless and obnoxious 'Yeah I Know', as if to say 'Yeah I Know it's crap we needed to fill the gaps'. From there the album lurches from uninteresting to half-baked to obnoxious, with a couple of moments of brilliance and some genuine potential thrown in. But that's just a first listen, maybe it'll get better with a second time around...

The answer is partly. My main issue with Notes On A Conditional will always just be how much of a missed opportunity it is and how every time Matty Healy's overly glossy voice whines about his life over the top of poppy guitars I'm just annoyed because it's obvious the talent the band has when looking at more ranging genres and it just feels like they're sticking with the same old shtick for the sake of not losing the fans of the older material. 

By the time the Greta Thunberg-featuring opener 'The 1975' dropped in July of last year the band had already missed their original release date by a few months, but the song showed signs of something different from the band, a lot more political and slightly ethereal-sounding. The followup, 'People' was another sign of a very different direction for the band, the punk/industrial bangs through it's 3 minutes making it obvious to anyone listening that The 1975 aren't messing around anymore. The third single, and the last interesting one, 'Frail State Of Mind' showed more of the 'night record' that Healy promised the album to be, and once again looked to be showing the band to be doing something different, which is why I was so expectant of more variety and experimentation on the album. 

Then came the bog-standard 1975 songs, 'Me & You Together Song' (admittedly well-written but ultimately dull), 'The Birthday Party' (one of the band's worst songs), 'Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America' (again just so dull), 'If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)' (incredibly obnoxious) and the self-indulgent but sweet 'Guys'. The issue with the singles for me is that they started to set up an album that doesn't exist, a politically charged, diverse and forward-thinking 1975 album with something to say, but what exists is a hash of different genres and ideas all badly patched together just making it all the more clear that the album wasn't thought through properly and was just a bunch of different ideas thrown together through 2 years of touring and pandering. 

The first two tracks give such hope for the album, 'The 1975' differs from their usual blowjob song opener and perfectly transitions into 'People', another declaration of change and anger... that seemingly disappears for the rest of the album. It feels like the band started off wanting to make an album about making change before realising their fans wanted more 'Chocolate', but did a quick detour on the way there with the admittedly beautiful 'The End (Music For Cars). By this point it would be good to get right into a great new track from the band, but the track-list dawdles through 3 more dull tracks to reach the similarly dull 'Yeah I Know'.

 I know that Healy and the rest of the band are trying to make this a 'complete' album and more of a full piece of art than a collection of songs by building a sound and variety to the album, but to do so this has resulted in padding and adding a whole lot of filler, which the vast majority of the first half succumbs to. This isn't to say that all the songs are truly awful, 'Roadkill' is an acceptable soft-rock (nearly country sounding?) song, 'Me & You Together Song' is annoying and plain but catchy enough to make it listenable, but for the most part the first half of the album is simply dry, uninteresting and overly saturated crap designed to please fans of older 1975 material rather than actually push forward and create an interesting album.

Fortunately, the album takes a pretty huge turn on 'I Think There's Something You Should Know', starting as an electronically backed 1975-classic ballad before degenerating into a murky and dark full-on electronic track, which essentially transforms the entire direction of the album. While the song isn't anything spectacular in itself, and is followed up by the admittedly beautiful but more formulaic 'Nothing Revealed/ Everything Denied', it shows off what is possible for the band to create. This is explored even better with 'Shiny Collarbone', a personal favourite from the album which is essentially another interlude except this one's actually really interesting and functions well as a song in of itself. 

The second half isn't perfect either unfortunately, in fact it might just be better because it has less singles on it so there's more new material to explore. There are a number of well-written songs that at the end of the day reduce to just more music for the pile like 'If You're Too Shy Let Me Know', 'Playing On My Mind' and 'Guys' which are pleasant enough but just fail to make the album more interesting or actually take it somewhere, which seems to be the curse of the album, acceptable filler that would be okay from a band who didn't have as much potential as The 1975.

There are glimpses of brilliance towards the end of the record, 'Having No Head' is a 6 minute masterful working of electronics and atmospheric elements that is truly one of the best songs the band has written to date, even though it is probably no one's favourite it is simply one of the best. 'What Should I Say' takes the bands signature whiny self-indulgent song and mixes it with electronics and autotune to just vary the idea up a bit to pretty good success. Tracks like this manage to salvage the end of the album in some way, despite the fact that...

'Guys' is one of the worst possible album closers, it's cheesy, annoying, musically boring. self-indulgent and arrogant to the point of wanting to just turn it off. It's okay to celebrate your success, but Matty Healy manages to be so preachy and irritating not just sonically but lyrically, which is such a shame considering how the rest of the album was shaping up. 

Notes On A Conditional Form is such a mess of an album, I'm fairly sure that it's possible to make this a really good album if you just strip away the majority of the filler and annoying overly-sentimental pop, but in the end it just doesn't deliver. 

4/10

Favourite tracks: People, Shiny Collarbone, Having No Head, Bagsy Not In Net, The End (Music For Cars)

Least Favourite Tracks: The Birthday Party, Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America, Guys, Then Because She Goes

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