01.

Bombay Bicycle Club

A Different Kind Of Fix

A Different Kind Of Fix is Bombay Bicycle Club’s third record in as many years. After coming 3rd on my list in both 2009 and 2010, the band has now taken the two (huge) steps necessary to reach the summit in 2011. Consistently high placings of 3, 3, 1 over a three year span means that – Amplifier aside – Bombay Bicycle Club are my favourite band right now. Along with contemporaries Noah And The Whale and Cold War Kids (but to my mind better than either), Bombay Bicycle Club are defining this period in music for me and are the best exponents of the (broad) sound that I’ll always associate with it. No other band will evoke the start of the second decade of the 21st century quite as much as Bombay Bicycle Club. Just as with Noah And The Whale, all three Bombay Bicycle Club albums are notably different from each other, while retaining an identifiable ‘sound’. The band’s third album is therefore deliberately, and entirely appropriately, called A Different Kind Of Fix: it represents yet another string to the BBC bow. I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose was frantic The Libertines style indie rock, Flaws was Kings Of Convenience-esque acoustic balladry. Eschewing either approach, A Different Kind Of Fix is a much more mainstream record, at least on initial listens: it calls to mind Snow Patrol’s Final Straw or maybe early Turin Breaks. It’s a slower, happier, cuddlier affair than most British rock bands would be brave enough to produce, but the lack of rage is more than made up for passion, meaning and damn good songs.

It really comes down to the fact that every track on show is an absolute peach. Opener ‘How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep’ sets the tone with a building repetitive refrain that lodges in the head from the outset. The wondrous shuffling piano riff of the aptly-named ‘Shuffle’ makes me want to dance absolutely every time I hear it. Closing ballad ‘Still’ is more beautiful than anything Chris Martin could ever dream of, but nonetheless evokes Coldplay at their best. ‘Lights Out, Words Gone’ is what Foals would sound like if they weren’t so unnecessarily contrary: math rock for English students. I could go on, but I’d have to list every track on the record.

A big bonus for A Different Kind Of Fix is the vocal work of Lucy Rose, who featured on Flaws but appears on more than half of the tracks here. Rose adds something really special to the BBC sound. More important, though, is a new freedom to do what sounds good and ignore what is cool, or what is fast or what is heavy just for the sake of those things. I probably wouldn’t really have liked this record ten years ago – my taste was a bit too pretentious. Now I see it as mainstream rock at its absolute best.

In the final analysis, no higher praise can be given to A Different Kind Of Fix than to say I ultimately preferred it to The Octopus...