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Envelopes’ debut album ‘Demon’ was a fresh broom through all the cobwebbed clichés of indiepop. It was quirky, spiky, mischievous and also packed with killer melodies. I was once rude enough at a dinner party to bring my own music and insist that the party and the hosts’ lives would be memorably improved by hearing ‘Demon’. They probably weren’t but at that time the album certainly improved mine.
Here Comes the Wind shares some of the same features. There are some brilliant pop songs like the post-punk agit-pop of ‘Freejazz’, where Audrey advises “make things happen/ provoke them!” ‘Smoke in the Desert, Eating the Sand, Hide in the Grass’ is life-enriching, combining more hooks than Abu Hamza’s spare parts store with a filthy, meandering bassline and shouty vocals. ‘Party’ has constantly itchy rhythms and is full of glossy pop splinters woven together, though I wonder if it was worth splitting the writing credit with Jim Steinman just so they could create the Bonnie Tyler pun: “totally fucked from the start”. The Envelopes have a playful attitude, from the strange sleevenotes that they write collectively to the way in ‘I’d Like 2 CU’ that the song starts, and then apparently restarts, as if the first bit was a mistake of tempo.
But while they’re still full of ideas, there are too many for this record. They write in the notes about the number of takes they used but some songs (especially the fractured ‘What’s The Deal?’) sound as if they’re made up of ideas spliced together for the sake of it, creating too many stop/start rhythms and jerky melodies. The line in ‘Party’ - “I am only half an inch from my own disaster” – is almost autobiographical on this evidence. But even when you’re on the point of despairing, they save themselves with Audrey’s pretty and direct father-story ‘Seawise’.
This doesn’t quite have the impact of Demon but some of the songs here are among the best things they’ve even written and it’s clear that ‘fun’ comes before ‘career’ in Envelopes’ dictionary of pop. This is wonderful and frustrating at one and the same time.
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