20YAT #25 The Seahorses – Do It Yourself
UK album chart peak: #2
Although by May 1997 the Britpop movement had been ailing for the best part of a year, there was still the odd glimmer of life sporadically coursing through its bands: Supergrass’ recent second album was full of intelligent, sparky melodies, Noel Gallagher’s remarkable cameo on Dig Your Own Hole hinted at a hitherto unexplored range, and even Blur’s reinvention demonstrated a credible path away from so many of the scene’s cliches.
Those glimmers weren’t enough, though, and if there’s one record that marks the point at which Britpop’s decline transforms into an inescapable death spiral, it’s probably Do It Yourself: 45 minutes of workaday blues rock scattered with laddish lyrics and Oasis knock-offs, written by a guitarist long regarded as a genius who now seemed intent on slaughtering his own sacred cow by teaming up with a singer so literally pedestrian he was found busking outside York’s branch of Woolworth’s.
For all that Do It Yourself debunked the theory of John Squire being a musical visionary, though, his guitar playing nonetheless provides the album’s highlights: the record’s establishing lick (which, amusingly, Squire extends well into the first verse, far louder than that pesky busker’s vocals) has a satisfying heft, and Love Is The Law, while admittedly a poor relation to I Am The Resurrection in the Squire shredding stakes, remains swaggering even at an onanistic eight minutes.
Chris Helme’s melodies, too, while vessels for some fairly dimwitted couplets, are inoffensively pretty, The Seahorses rhythm section is competent enough and, on one level, Do It Yourself has all the harmlessness and self-indulgence of a private fart. However, on another, a record this ambition-free can’t get away with simply being innocuous. After all, while this is an album unabashed in its retrospection, instead of drawing inspiration from any of the golden greats that had provided such rich inspiration for the past three or so years, it simply pilfers from its peers. Accordingly, here is a record in debt not to the Kinks or the Stones, but to Cast and the Bluetones, and that brazen cannibalism is what’s fatal beyond the confines of the album: when the hand-me-downs are going through their third generation, it’s surely time to chuck everything out and start afresh.
Come Christmas, The Seahorses would place fourth in the NME poll for best new band of 1997 (behind, Embrace, Stereophonics and Travis, ushering in the post-Britpop wave of underwhelming, over-sincere late 90s festival headliners), and shortly thereafter Squire would sack The Seahorses’ drummer and eventually the whole band, and withdraw completely from music. With horizons as narrow as this, that withdrawal was probably for the best.
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Also out this week:
Smog – Red Apple Falls (Domino). Did not chart
Feeder – Polythene (Echo). Chart peak #65
Fountains of Wayne – Fountains of Wayne (Atlantic). Chart peak #67
Ben Harper – The Will To Live (Virgin). Chart peak #87
