I often question movie directors who feel the need to act in their own films, especially the good ones. The worst part of Quentin Tarantino’s stellar Pulp Fiction is the scene he steps in front of the camera and tries to match acting chops with Keitel, Travolta and Jackson — it’s like bringing a tricycle to the Tour de France. Spike Lee is a better actor in his films, but not by much. If Mookie died instead of Radio Raheem, that would have been just fine with me.
The same problems arise when music producers move their names from the liner notes to the album cover (vinyl is not dead in my household). Sometimes it’s a revelation (Dr. Dre, Danger Mouse) and sometimes not so much (Timbaland). For Swedish producing team Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, Grammy Award winners who’ve worked with Britney Spears, Madonna and Kylie Minogue, the creation of their band Miike Snow has been fodder for the meh list. But the arrival of Happy To You has the duo (with New Yorker and lead singer Andrew Wyatt as the third man in the tripod) moving closer to the yeah list with a 10-song album which is varied and stylish.
My main quibble is it has too many ideas. There are disco songs and poppy dance numbers, ballads and electronic blips, bells and horns, strings and synths. Wyatt, sounding somewhere between Andrew Vanwyngarden and Peter Gabriel, brings the lyrics to life with his bouncy falsetto.
Opening track “Enter The Joker’s Lair” is apropos, Wyatt’s voice rises and falls with electronic beeps at the song’s outset, but the track quickly becomes a trip to Super Mario land. I half expected magic mushrooms to fall from the sky. The mood changes with “Devil’s Work,” a sinister song employing stern piano, stabbing synths and haunting horns — it has a certain weight to it. “God Help This Divorce” carries this trait despite its lilting, dreamlike exterior — Wyatt speaks of a bad marriage in stark terms. “She was a beauty queen,” he coos, “but I held her down, down, down.” It’s beautiful and dour.
Happy To You has its stumbles. “Pretender” brings back the specter of Haddaway from the song that will not be named, while “Black Tin Box” is dull and somber — not even a guest appearance from Lykke Li can save it. Yet the band snaps back up, as the album-ending “Paddling Out” returns a cheerful status to the record, bringing the record to a radiant resolution.
As star producers who know what works, if Karlsson and Winnberg were not in Miike Snow they would most likely tell Miike Snow to rein it in a bit — there’s too much here to absorb and it puts the listener in a daze. But the band is not too far from clarity, as amidst the barrage is brilliance. With a smidgen of focus, Miike Snow is primed for starring roles on stages everywhere. And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.
