The group making Rock sound like a walk in the park – A Maximo one. New post time!

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Greetings! It’s teatime – and it’s also time for me to get writing up about your daily track on the blog, since it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to get typing up about a different piece of music every single day! We’re going to round off the month with new music from an established Alternative Rock group who are from my home turf of England, here in the UK. That’s right – Maximo Park are back! It makes a nice change for me because I can’t recall hearing much from them for quite some time, but I can still remember the Newcastle trio being around quite a lot while I was growing up, with chart hits like “Our Velocity” and “Books From Boxes” that were taken from their second album, “Our Earthly Pleasures”, which was certified as Gold in sales within the UK. Their debut album, “A Certain Trigger”, achieved the same commercial milestone, as well as being nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2005. “Nature Always Wins” is the title of their forthcoming seventh album, and it is set for release on February 26th, in the new year of 2021. Fronted by vocalist and songwriter Paul Smith, the band have recently unveiled our second look at the upcoming new album with the single “Baby, Sleep”, with their new album marking their first new music release in three years, since the release of 2017’s LP, “Risk To Exist”. Check out the official music video below.

The band ended up finishing their upcoming new album across the globe by virtually producing the record with Atlanta-based producer Ben Allen, who has worked with Deerhunter and Animal Collective, sharing work between the two continents due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Paul Smith has described the new single, “Baby, Sleep” as “a light-hearted look at the surreal nature of sleep deprivation, and the way it distorts normality in a capitalist society”, via his press notes. The opening is remarkably familiar, as Paul Smith sings: “It may appall you to know/But the mall is the only place I go” and “Same channel on my TV/The talking heads just can’t agree” before he stops and he asks himself: “What does the modern world mean to me?”, a little hook that continually permeates through the rest of the track. The instrumentation is very guitar-based, and it evokes some 90’s nostalgia with it’s Brit-Pop feel. It leads to an adult-oriented, lyrically mature chorus as Smith sings: “My baby only sleeps when she wants to/But, baby, so rarely wants”, as in a very small child, and not a “Baby” in a lover or romantic sense. The final stretch is more witty and observational, as Paul chants: “What are all these balloons doing in my front room?” with a shattered bass guitar breakdown overlapping his comedic, strongly accented vocals. The chorus invokes a sweet and lullaby-like quality, and the subtle backing vocals of a female choir add a charming, sentimental harmony, which mixes with the energetic tone of Smith gritting his teeth at the political condition of the world in the earlier sections nicely. Overall, I’m not really sure of what the relevance of Maximo Park is in 2020 – and that’s a pity, because what you get here is smart songwriting skills and a human element to the presentation that seems realistic, but thoughtful and engaging. Not likely to drastically change the world – but it’s easily going to put a smile on your face.

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Thank you for reading my new blog post! That’s it for November of 2020 – but you are more than welcome to join me again tomorrow, as we ring in a new month with a novelty single from 1979, based on a children’s TV series created by Elisabeth Bereford, that may just have something to do with the “C” word that relates to the 25th of December… It may leave you Wombling! If you really liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every new daily post is up and why not like the Facebook page here?: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/