When I first listened to The Optimist, I was blown away. My massive speakers blaring out these beautifully introspective guitar ostinati and double tracked vocals with a good dash of electronics to boot got my little rock n roll brain all shook up. I listen to it now, and I hear it for what it is: Cishet white boys moaning about things in vague terms that they try to pass off as abstract. This album is a good listen in some ways, in throwaway moments and lapses in the pretentiousness of it all, we find some failsafe songwriting that I’m pretty sure AI could have put out.
(Cover from a fine day to exit)
This album is a concept album, set after the events of the two-decade old A Fine Day To Exit, which is surprisingly nuanced and thought-provoking, unlike its sequel. We find the Optimist character at “32.63n 117.14w” (Silver Strand Beach, San Diego), which, avid listeners would notice is where the cover photograph for his last appearance i.e A Fine Day To Exit was taken. He flicks through radio stations in his car and settles on one, which morphs into the album. Clever, yes, but honestly, I would’ve thought this kind of novelty gimmick would’ve been discarded, even from the apparent trashcan of pretentiousness that was rummaged through for every single idea we hear in this album.
The songs themselves are sonically dense and beautifully sculpted, making for a big, intense sound that could really have captured the imagination, if they had any imagination to start with. The first half of the album is a bunch of songs that sound exactly like each other: “Endless Ways”, “The Optimist” and “Ghosts” could very easily be mistaken for one another. San Francisco is a Philip Glass/Yann Tiersen-esque minimalist venture into the electronic corners of ambient prog and falls a little flat on emotional delivery, as well produced and performed as it may be.
(The cover is obviously set to the headlights of the car from the previous album, driving away from the beach. Pretentious?)
That brings me to the best part of this album. Creatively barren as they may be right now, Anathema are good, even great musicians. This collection of siblings (literally two pairs of them!) and a stray drummer are at the peak of their musical abilities. Lee Daniels could sing Nazi propaganda music and still have it be the most soulful lullaby ever sung. Daniel and Vincent Cavanaugh create lush instrumental work with ease, with the gritty but somehow beat-perfect grooves of Daniel Cardoso. Live concert performances like these go to prove that autotune and editing software have little to do with how well this band forms one auditory entity.
The ear finds itself stimulated in the last quarter of the album, where “Can’t Let Go’ reminds us that there are chord progressions that don’t need two minor seventh chords and a dominant over and over again. The song has a pleasant and evocative atmosphere and feels like the lovechild of Radiohead and U2.
“Close Your Eyes” has Lee Daniels sounding like a youthful Enya, followed by a delicately played trumpet line and jazzy drums and piano straight out of a modern film noir. Lee Daniels joins this sudden jazz trio and transforms the last 30 seconds of this song into a powerful but restrained ballad, channelling an early 80s Grace Slick.
Wildfires offers a dark reflection of “The Optimist”, followed by “Back to the Start”, which delivers a quietly determined introspection and genuinely sounds like a sedated Roger Waters.
So where’s the problem? The Cavanaugh brothers. They’ve written a bunch of wanky guitar-focussed alt rock that is strung out and overused. It sounds great, but their voices are really easy to tire of and you find yourself wondering if this is one of those bedroom songwriters who had their girlfriend sing a track or two, for her pretty voice. Daniels is present less as a feminine voice and more as a muse, an object, a phenomenon to admire. She presents the tender moments that the Cavanaughs are too masculine to.
Here we go, then. White boy rock, he’s sad, writes a bunch of loose metaphors and a bunch of other white boys, especially the grey-haired ones find great solace in this and shower praise on it. Consider this review from the Prog Reportezine “this is a worthy achievement by a band that is unafraid to take risks and go their own way”. Reading between the lines, we see ‘take risks’ to be the rockist way of saying they’re not going the mainstream pop direction (which they are, because this album is much more marketable than any of its predecessors), and ‘their own way’ to mean, well, ‘the right way’. This is a continuing theme in prog-head criticism.
“Recorded more as a live band, and less an exercise in pro-tools cutting and pasting, The Optimist definitely benefits from having all six members in the same room – things feel a lot less choppy and there’s a definite flow to the record as a whole” says Gavin Miller of Drowned in Sound. A dated concept, at best, a live band recording is chopped and edited a lot more, sometimes than a multitrack recording, because musicians, surprise surprise, fuck up a lot. Trust the producer who spent all night on a live band recording, covering up messes and overdubbing bad playing instead of writing this assignment. This distaste for any work done on a computer makes me ache to say ‘okay, boomer’ and roll my eyes for this pseudo-puritanism. Guess what, Mr. Miller, do you know why this record grooves like it does? Google Melodyne. Everyone uses it, even your favourite prog bands, because your masturbatorily self-indulgent weird time signatures need to have all your bajillion string guitars and polyrhythm drums all lined up to sound right. Skilled as they may be, Anathema are not recording into a 24 track tape desk, which I know would be your wet dream.
