ME REX dress up vapid songwriting with cerebral wordplay in debut album Giant Elk

Originally the lockdown project of Miles McCabe, Brighton indie outfit ME REX has been fleshed out into a three-piece with the help of Phoebe Cross (drums/vocals) and Rich Mandell (bass/keys/production), in service of its gargantuan wordplay. The ‘indie band for the thinking man’ strategy neatly follows up the conceptual verbosity of previous projects like the 2021 52-track project Megabear and the 2022 EPs Plesiosaur & Pterodactyl, regenerating images of its colossal animal kingdom.

The Giant Elk centrepiece is a wacky jurassic world-building apparently inspired by the whimsical vignettes of Jeff Mangum & Neutral Milk Hotel – but instead of a fin-de-siecle midnight circus, it’s a landscape of classical mythology & misshapen, overgrown prehistory. What’s left behind is the songwriting, characterised by 2010s guitar-indie cliches and generic production decisions. McCabe’s ambitious and fabulatory vision for the album comes across as a little misplaced alongside this musical vapidity.

The first single, the grandiosely named “Eutherians / Ultramarine” introduces an ambitious and authorial voice for which one titular classical metaphor is simply not sufficient: the song is concerned with, in McCabe’s words, both the platonic myth of “a creature cursed to continue life split in half,” and the “chaos and danger of the sea.” Hence the lyricist’s concern with fabulous creatures being “rabid and slathering,” arriving “all scorched and singed” into a strange new world. With all that going on, songwriting, musicianship, and production seem to have been forgotten. We’re offered flashes of fourth wave midwest emo features (think Modern Baseball and Mom Jeans), but the key takeaway is the failure to interpret tired guitar band tropes and pop song architecture.

After a gimmicky opening duo – “Slow Worm” and “Infinity Worm” flogging the album’s only compelling riff for two songs in a row, initially acoustic and latterly electronic – we’re left with nine versions of the same 2010s indie song. Admittedly, second single “Giant Giant Giant” has a synth in it, and “Halley” includes electronic elements like vocal samples, manipulations, and astronautical synth-work. Not every band has to not be a guitar band, and, after all, we are treated to some enjoyable Bloc Party and Two Door Cinema Club-esque drums and strumming patterns.

All the same, the whole project feels like it’s running to catch up with its titular magnificence. This album feels particularly tired in its vocals/guitar/bass/drums situation and features unengaging instrumental performances at pretty much every level, not least the in the vocal line with its contrived inflections. The group’s songwriting unleashes some decent but hardly mammoth hooks, namely the anthemic choruses of the two singles, but they’re overworked by repetitive song structure. Stripping back on texture in the third quarter and galloping back in full for the final chorus is, alas, hardly groundbreaking.

It’s difficult not to respect the conceptual strong-arming behind an album that aims to discuss Plato, infinity, masculinity, and loneliness. Nevertheless, it’s not obvious that there’s much going on underneath the long words, bar an inoffensive if tasteless pastiche of noughties emo melodic features and circa 2011 indie production.