It is easy to be mistrustful of actors; faking it well is their business. As many will know, given the band’s handful of nagging singles – the ubiquitous, chart-topping King; the older but equally persistent Desire – Years & Years singer Olly Alexander first made his name on the small screen, as a stalker-ish photographer in Skins. (In mitigation, he also had a part in Skins’ antimatter, Stuart Murdoch’s film God Help the Girl.)
The charge sheet doesn’t stop there. Y&Y were an indie-ish keyboard outfit on cool French label Kitsuné before the vogue for soulful pop-house took off along with Disclosure. This London threesome swapped one genre for another, and one kind of performance for another – a shamelessly opportunistic one-two that unsurprisingly landed them the top spot on the BBC Sound of 2015 list.
That’s not what is wrong with them, though. Pop has always favoured the nimble, and Y&Y are by no means the first act to swap amp leads for laptops. In the column marked “credit”, their conversion has at least been total, and every one of these 13 tracks feels definitively, seamlessly “now” – that is, 90s-inflected digital pop with emotive vocals.
In the column marked “debit”, however, is the slavishness with which Y&Y have pursued this sound, to the exclusion of any personality twists not previously explored in their singles. It’s wall-to-wall tish, tish, tish, yearn, yearn, yearn. There’s little rhythmic diversity, unless you count the beatless album opener, Foundation, and a couple of slowies, such as Without, a ballad. Worship bears a distant, skipping echo of two-step, but diluted to the point of homeopathy. Shine is made up of pastel chords and obvious key changes with all the daring and originality of a watercolour of a labrador.
It would be wrong to blame Communion’s shortcomings on Alexander’s previous career, or on the band’s opportunism. Emotions are emotions, whether expressed on dance floors or in rehearsal rooms. Vanilla dance-pop doesn’t look like ending its chart hegemony any time soon.
While we celebrate singers whose music audibly reflects their felt experience – Sam Smith’s unrequited love, say – we don’t particularly mind swapping authenticity for verisimilitude, as long as it is convincing. Alexander has one of those reedy tenors that sounds like he is permanently on the verge of tears, holding notes against the odds. He’s in extremis on the sour narrative of Ties; he’s making like a desperado on Border, full of Coldplay-ish “oh, oh, oh’s”. It’s this sustained bleating, whatever the song’s circumstances, that strains your belief, not what he used to do for a living.
