20YAT #10 Gene – Drawn To The Deep End
UK album chart peak: #8
Around the time of Drawn To The Deep End’s promotion, it was easy to dismiss Gene as second-tier Britpop: while not as flimsy a band as Menswear (although Martin Rossiter was nearly as cartoonishly foppish) their debut two years previously nonetheless seemed to lack any real bite or ambition, and their comeback single, Fighting Fit, was pretty plodding, meat-and-potatoes indie rock. In the following years, too, an ignominious decline that dragged into the 21st century helped cement the idea of Gene being little other than mid-90s also-rans – fine but never great, more stylish than substantial.
That characterisation is unfortunate: revisiting Drawn To The Deep End twenty years on, there’s bite and ambition aplenty here, to the extent that one wonders whether, had they broken up immediately after its release, the band might’ve been remembered as a could’ve-been rather than a never-was.
Indeed, Drawn To The Deep End’s high points are a revelation: I Love You What Are You’s fearless stab at the sort of rock opera in which Queen were delighting twenty years earlier has a faint whiff of the ridiculous – the title line in each verse is sung in deadly serious tight, multi-part harmony around guitar crunches and grand pianos – but Rossiter’s delivery has enough panache to carry it off. Likewise, the elegantly grand six minutes of Why I Was Born is, on one level, a bombastic piece of prog self-indulgence containing a pair of guitar solos and two constantly alternating time signatures. Its overreaching should be its downfall, but again Gene match ambition with execution.
The album’s closing minute, too, is just as stylistically bold: as the guitars and drums on Sub Rosa quote The Beatles’ Dear Prudence nearly verbatim in what becomes the album’s most brazen reference, the string arrangement recalls the album’s very first melody, providing a neat bookending effect. It’s a daring trick, and even while it’s not a clean hit this time, the confidence required even to attempt it belies the received wisdom surrounding Gene’s stature.
Perhaps what stymies Drawn To The Deep End, though, is that when the band aren’t at their most extravagant, they can appear callow: Rossiter’s warble, channelling Morrissey tonally and often lyrically with almost plagiaristic zeal (Long Sleeves For The Summer’s line about “a list of clubs I should go”, echoing How Soon Is Now, is the album’s most transparent), grates during the album’s starker songs, and as raucous rock brushes up against dainty acoustic balladry and orchestral prog, the album ends up feeling a touch distractible, as if Gene don’t quite know what to be.
For a band as serious and melodramatic as them, though, in the context of Britpop’s relentless insincerity, that identity crisis is forgivable. Twenty years on, however, the landscape is slightly clearer, and Drawn To The Deep End actually seems like a peculiarly British interpretation of emo: indeed, with it’s bruised passion and histrionic lyrics (“Smash into my life and hold me!” implores Speak To Me Someone), it actually forms an interesting answer record to that other great British emo record of the mid-90s, The Bends.
Those albums are not equals, in either inventiveness or quality, and come June, Radiohead would blow the comparison away entirely with the release of OK Computer. But from two decades’ distance, Drawn To The Deep End strikes a far more harmonious chord – both with The Bends and with ambitious, emotional music in general – than Gene’s reputation might allow.
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Also out this week:
Mansun – Attack Of The Grey Lantern (Parlophone). Chart peak #1
