I want my 39 minutes back, to be honest. I went into the album curious at the wacky image of the band, the minimalist album art and the idea of a concept album – ask your parents/a music journalist what they are, kids – in the year of our Lord 2018.
Unfortunately, Attention Earth! fails to live up to those expectations. While it’s unfair to expect Dark Side of the Moon, Attention Earth! is a plodder of an album. It’s like the worst of the late 60’s/early 70’s concept albums, in that it’s dragged out and ambitious to the point of incoherence. This is why we had punk and New Wave. Now, to be fair, I’m a sucker for a good two/three-minute pop song, but I can appreciate longer songs; one of my favourite songs, Nick Cave’s ‘The Mercy Seat’, is over 7 minutes. There are occasional shafts of light in Attention Earth!, with ‘Indigo Dust’ being memorably good and ‘Monolith’ being okay, but the rest is sadly lacking. It’s not awful, it’s just not worth your time – if you’re looking for spacey theatrics in 2018, I suggest you either move on from that like the entirety of popular music has been doing for the last 50-odd years or listen to The Moonlandingz.
[Gabriel Rutherford – @niemalsallein_]
[Image credit: Ken Harrison]
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