Artist.......: The Chap Album........: We Are Nobody Label........: LoRecordings Genre........: Indie Catnr........: n/a source.......: CDDA rip.date.....: Mar-24-2012 str.date.....: 2012 quality......: VBR/44.1Hz/Joint-Stereo Url..........: n/a track title time 01. Rhythm King 03:00 02. What Did We Do? 03:40 03. Better Place 03:03 04. Talk Back 02:52 05. We Are Nobody 03:41 06. Curtains 03:55 07. Painkiller 03:44 08. Running With Me 02:42 09. Hands Free 02:36 10. Look At The Girl 02:45 11. This Is Sick 03:14 Runtime 35:12 min Size 63,6 MB Release Notes: When The Chap announced its plans to release an album of ôNON-IRONIC super straight pop songs,ö it was hard to take the news at face value. After all, the U.K. group has spent the majority of its decade-long career sending up the conventions, affectations and excesses of ôstraightö pop with an approach thatÆs part social satire, part crazed meta-pop bricolage. Consider ôProper Rock,ö from 2008Æs Mega Breakfast. Belting like a concussed Freddy Mercury, Chap singer Johannes von WeizsΣcker wryly proclaims ôArt, art, art donÆt make no rave, Dave,ö and demands ôproper songs for real folk.à Proper songs about girls and clubbing!ö ItÆs a fussy, hyper-referential pastiche of dance beats, stuffy electro-acoustic instrumentation and campy daubs of studio gloss, swathing its subject in layers of ironic detachment and self-reflexive cleverness. The scare quotes are palpable. There and elsewhere, The Chap are less interested in writing ôproper songsö and more interested prying them apart and rebuilding them, holding up a funhouse mirror to popÆs escapist pleasures and gleefully warping them into a new form that lands somewhere between bemused homage and absurdist critique. We Are Nobody, The ChapÆs fifth, latest and allegedly irony-free album, contains no proper songs about girls and clubbing. However, itÆs fair to call it the bandÆs most straightforward work to date. The album is not so much devoid of irony as devoid of the explicitly goofy gestures elsewhere in The Chap discography: guttural squawks, garish abuse of the Vocoder, Shakira quotes. With fewer distractions, itÆs easier to appreciate how much the Chap have going for them beyond sardonic wit. When theyÆre not just trying to be clever, theyÆre genuinely smart, sophisticated songwriters with a surprisingly dark outlook. ôRhythm King,ö ôTalk Backö and ôPainkillerö throb with melancholic paranoid-android funk, suggesting the pleasures of The ChapÆs un-pop mirror world can be just as seductive as this one. But without the buoyancy of silliness, We Are Nobody tends to sink in to a chilly postmodern malaise. ôTalk Backö unfurls a hypnotic, circular chorus declaring, ôEveryone, all the same, all the timeàö The titular track follows in a similar vein with its identity-dissolving mantra, ôI am you, you are we, we are nobody.ö The characters of this world arenÆt buffoonish art snobs and party animals. TheyÆre lonely, anonymous and lost, and The Chap donÆt claim to be above the fray. At times, the bandÆs experiment in sincerity is an awkward fit. Part of the difficulty lies in their consistently ultra-dry delivery. ItÆs perfect for caricaturing pop banalities and upper-crusty social mores, but not so adept at conveying honest, unguarded sentiment. ItÆs as if theyÆve inhabited the pose for so long, they canÆt quite bring themselves to be unironically unironic. The gestures feel stiff and constrained, almost parodically bleak. The pervasive gloom can spill over into easy nihilism. ôLook at the Girlö is a twinkly little number whose twist ending starkly contrasts with the deadpan declaration that ôshe creates her own destiny.ö Compared to the more nuanced anxieties expressed elsewhere in the album, the rug-yanking seems needlessly heavy-handed. At its best, though, We Are Nobody nails an uneasy mood that feels like a natural evolution of the ChapÆs acerbic wit: waiting for a punchline that never arrives.