Maximo Park 'Our Earthly Pleasures' album

Maxïmo Park release a new single, taken from their Number Two debuting album Our Earthly Pleasures, through Warp Records on Monday 11th June. Books From Boxes is the follow-up to the Top Ten smash Our Velocity. As a special treat the bonus songs include a cover version of The Proclaimers hardy perennial, 500 Miles.

500 Miles was recorded for Jo Whilley's Live Lounge. When it was originally aired, it lit-up Radio One's switchboard with requests to have the song released. Also featured as a B-side is another song in the band's continuing series of obituaries. This time it's famous Guardian photographer Don McPhee. Previous single Our Velocity included Robert Altman and Mary O'Brien as bonus tracks.

Of the obituaries, singer Paul Smith says, "I wrote the lyrics for a song about Mary O'Brien, Dusty Springfield's real name, after reading her obituary. I discovered I was interested in reading obituaries as they can be such a great celebration of a person's life, also it became a way for me to write about other people." Guitarist Duncan Lloyd adds "I had some folk inspired music that Paul put his lyrics to and we recorded them at home so as to make them as simple as possible and expose the most natural aspect of what we do. These obituary songs are probably the most thoughtful set of songs we have written to date."

biography
Maxïmo Park seem to come from the strong tradition of British social realism, of the kind embodied in Sixties black and white films by the brooding presence of an Alan Bates or Albert Finney, as their frustrated and, always, Northern characters wrestled with an overpowering sense of misanthropy in a world of scant opportunity and snatched furtive sex, usually resulting in unwanted pregnancy and backstreet abortion.

Actually, despite coming from Newcastle Upon Tyne, Maxïmo Park do not sing about any of these things – except perhaps the furtive sex. And they certainly don’t consciously hark back to the past in the sepia tones of, say, the Smiths. But, there at the centre of these tightly-wound songs are biting contemporary takes on familiar feelings of being stuck in a small town and desperately needing to find some energy and sense of relief, just to stay alive.

Maxïmo Park songs positively vibrate with contained energy, and it is something that more than occasionally spills out. Singer Paul Smith describes the anger behind the songs as a force to drive them forward, ever faster. “It’s the same with the live performance,” he says. “There is a controlled power that enables you to give the audience something of the feelings you had when you wrote the songs.”

It’s true, listening to his tales of missed sexual opportunity (‘The Night I Lost My Head’, ‘Just A Glimpse’ and ‘Kiss You Better’ – do I detect a theme here?) and inability to achieve even basic aims (‘Apply Some Pressure’, ‘Signal & Sign’), you recognise the kinds of small situations and scenarios to which we can all relate.

Claiming to be inspired by no other front men, Paul cuts the intriguing and charismatic character of perhaps a less gawky junior Jarvis Cocker, able to articulate in his own instantly, identifiable voice and effortlessly expand the pop lexicon to include such words as “inertia” and “Limassol”, while rhyming a simple line like “I am young and I am lost” with an egg-head couplet like “you respond to my riposte!”.

In truth, though, Maxïmo Park are all about pop songs. They pepper their material with nagging, insistent hooks set in easy-yet-inventive structures, which seem to borrow from such excellent and disparate sources as the Stone Roses (the euphoria), Dinosaur Jnr (the guitars), Stranglers (the organ) and Wire (some other guitars).

‘Graffiti’, in some ways, exemplifies the Maxïmo Park experience, beginning with urgent, plangent guitars and the first line “Well, that’s enough, I can’t take it anymore!” before proceeding to the proposition that “I’ll do graffiti, if you sing to me in French”. It is at once so preposterous and oddly romantic that you can’t help but feel strangely elated.

Elsewhere, ‘Going Missing’ embodies the overwhelming sense of freedom you get for about two days when you finally shake off a shitty relationship. Lukas Wooller’s exultant organ chords and Archis Tiku and Duncan Lloyd’s splendid chiming guitars make it an instant anthem. These two songs were on a soon-to-be very valuable debut independent single, which earlier this year sold out in the North East and attracted the stunned attention of Steve Beckett at Warp Records.

Now Warp are betting the farm on a band they are viewing as the label’s most important pop commodity since they released the trio of singles which propelled Pulp into the mainstream 10 years since. Not for the first time Warp are right.

Maxïmo Park are Lukas Wooller (keyboards), Tom English (drums), Archis Tiku (guitars), Duncan Lloyd (guitars) and Paul Smith (vocals).

The original Maximo Gomez Park is in Havana, Cuba, although there is now another similarly named picnicking spot in St Peterburg, Florida. The relevance of this fact remains, however, unclear.

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Maximo Park - Our Earthly Pleasures