6. Bloodsports
'But will they love you/the way, the way I loved you?'
Released earlier this year to a light flurry of positive publicity, Bloodsports has been hailed as a return to form (not difficult when your last album was that bad). Anyone hoping for something on the scale of Dog Man Star (spoilers!!!) needs to understand, though, that this is what music sounds like when it's played by men closing in on fifty. Focused, polished and perfectly polite, it's Coming Up on squash rather than coke, or the unborn second album from Anderson and Butler's side project The Tears. That it's pedestrian is both a virtue and a vice. The rockier numbers, like lead-off single 'Barriers', are precision geared anthems, smoothly alternating verse and chorus and deliberately avoiding the fripperies that sank A New Morning. The ballads, of which there are many, soar and swoop for the pleasure of ears conditioned by Radio 2. There is no wincing attempt at dubstep, no hint of the hypnagogic, no visit to the witch house. This is a record that could have been released ten or fifteen years ago and not sounded at all out of synch. It's good that the band have embraced their limits, but there is one major problem. It's not that the songs are bad, or even particularly dull- there are hooks aplenty, and it's pacy enough. On these counts, the album qualifies as a success. I would even call it perfect, except that's exactly the problem with it. It doesn't work because it doesn't leave an impression. It doesn't leave an impression because there are no mistakes on it. And there are no mistakes on it because Anderson and co. have been doing this for long enough that they don't make mistakes. If you repeat something enough, you perfect it, so there is perfection here- sterile, clean perfection- just as there is repetition- a repetition of the best moments on Coming Up, Head Music, even Here Come the Tears. They're not striving towards a new sound or taking fascinating detours, as they were on the debut or Dog Man Star- old men now, they're just reclothing familiar elements in shinier production. The only thing they do get wrong is the title- 'Bloodless' would have at least been more apt.