Clock Opera – Ways To Forget

Guy Connelly, head of Clock Opera, has called what he does “chop-pop”, a self-cataloguing that he no doubt thoroughly regrets now they’re a full band but a neat synonym for how his intriguing work is set out. Building layer upon layer, interfacing textures, cutting up, re-pasting and looping samples, effects and bits he found while attempting to construct electronic melodies, it sounds thoroughly machine-worked and simultaneously like something pored over by a proper band working long hours. Perhaps both of these are true – not an unreasonable post-Radiohead assumption. In any case, Ways To Forget sounds like the work of people adhering to meticulous detail, ensuring everything is just right.

What that unfortunately also means is the majority of these songs, primarily the first half of the album, seem to fall into an identifiable, followable structure. There’s a fast-modulating, purposeful synth pulse for an intro, a plangent Connelly vocal not dissimilar to Peter Gabriel’s with a hint of Guy Garvey, sometimes with piano mixed behind it, a part where either the synth or the vocal drops out and everything builds towards a moment where the drums kick in afresh and the whole thing coalesces and drives over the top as Connolly’s voice becomes more strident and boldly impetuous, then some big keyboard chords and wordless vocalising in an unfortunately Chris Martin-recalling style to drive the whole thing home before the coda breaks it down to a soft landing. The other immediate impression is rather more unfortunate, the first three tracks all bearing a marked similarity to the recent Maccabees album, something Connelly presumably didn’t hear before writing and recording (the stomping, stadium-envisioning ‘Once And For All’ was after all originally released in mid-2010) but the ambitious dynamics and air of desperation of which has an uncomfortable retrospective mirror, as well as possessing the most Coldplay-like bridge on the album.

Self-defeatingly, the best track here, ‘Belongings’, works so well because it delays the inevitable for so long and with such expert craft, a looping piano part cut up and stitched back together to sound more like a Philip Glass piece. With found sounds and hi-hats slowly building underneath it’s clearly leading somewhere huge, yet it takes three run-ups and more than three and a half minutes, including Connolly looping samples of himself, to crash into a full band moment of white-light realisation, adding its own resolution to the lyrical confession of carrying the weight of pasts and potential futures, both in terms of emotional belongings and “somewhere I can belong”. The redistributed sampling works most effectively on the sliced and diced Afrobeat guitars on former single ‘A Piece Of String’, acting as ballast against the heavy synth bass and glitched electronics underneath, the track bearing the same sort of relationship to electro club sounds as those of Yeasayer, hitting emotional peaks while never allowing itself to settle into a standard groove. Coming after the punchy, stridulous ‘White Noise’ it suggests that perhaps this warping of rhythms into quietly-pummelling shape, rather than simply taking the same influences as the last couple of British guitar bands to make it to arenas (the influence of Elbow’s beloved Talk Talk is often apparent) would have been the more productive route for the band. As long as it’s not the straight-up synthpop found on ‘Man Made’ and ‘The Lost Buoys’, where twinkly synths and on the former a hefty bassline attempt to develop some structural heft but end up sounding like The Temper Trap verging on Belouis Some.

Despite the ambition, Ways To Forget is never merely artlessly epic. The build almost always delays and goes the slow way round rather than heading straight through route one of slow-build hugeness, cutting the cord rather than launching straight into the mighty anthemry. The nagging suspicion remains, though, that Connelly and co aren’t entirely certain of how to use their plentiful inventive ideas to their fullest and so instead keep falling back into a standard setting of proposed grandiosity, living down to the expectations engendered by their way of doing things. It’s not a bad album by any means, there’s plenty going on and there’s a clearly defined sense of purpose anchoring it, but ultimately it keeps coming back to a plain query – why isn’t this album as good as it should be?