Video Premiere: British Sea Power: "Waving Flags"
Could it just be a rhetorical question? "Waving Flags", from British Sea Power's forthcoming third LP Do You Like Rock Music?, doesn't offer much doubt about the answer to the album's title-- the Brighton quartet likes rock, thank you, particularly dour, scruffy post-punk with surging U2 and Arcade Fire anthemics. The video for the song is less immediately comprehensible, involving rapidly changing images of stuff like ocean liners and helicopters, band members hanging around near a staircase, and a guy in some kind of huge bear-like costume out of the cover of My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves. Oh yeah, there are even people waving flags.
Big-room guitars rattle and stab, climbing higher and higher above an even bigger room's worth of rousing backing vocals. The stop-motion special effects are nice, but blink and you could be watching almost anything. And although the band clearly likes rock music's tropes, it's harder to say what they're doing with them. To U.S.-born ears, the lyrics sure seem to discuss immigration, but it's hard to tell whether we're talking Neil Diamond's "America" or Morrissey's "Bengali in Platforms". "You are astronomical fans of alcohol/ So welcome in," Yan sings, lightly and breathily, later asking, "Are you of legal drinking age?" Another rhetorical question? I dunno.
[from Do You Like Rock Music?; due 1/14/07 in the UK on Rough Trade and 2/12/07 in the U.S. on Rough Trade/World's Fair]