James, All The Colours Of You
Nothing But Love Music
It’s almost too on-the-nose to start a COVID-age record with a painfully dragged out “we’re all gonna die,” but James, of course, do so with grace. Is it even necessary to note their near-on forty years of experience, and the fact that All The Colours Of You is their sixteenth album? Probably not, but what James have lived through and gone through in their time as a band sets them up perfectly to respond to the current state of the world with some subtlety, and some head-on attack, and ensure that they feel more essential than ever before.
Many musicians have shied away from talking about the Big C, for fear of what – losing timelessness? Feeling too obvious? Well, All The Colours Of You deals with COVID sharply, starkly, and unapologetically, proving that sometimes what seems obvious is necessary. The title track singes through lyrics about quarantine, the Ku Klux Klan, being caged, literally and metaphorically – but it doesn’t feel rushed or unimaginative. James are so seasoned by now that All The Colours Of You already, somehow, feels like a far off legacy of the time it was written in, unearthing the past in synthy grandeur and swelling power to tell its tales.
Lyrical phraseology from the world of the pandemic does pervade All The Colours Of You, but manages not to be one-note. James approach quarantine and lockdown, those oh-so-inevitable sources of inspiration, with a wide-angle lens. There’s Recover, zooming close in and never flinching as it murmurs “he can’t breathe without a machine,” one of the album’s most personal and painful moments penned about the loss of frontman Tim Booth’s father-in-law. Then there’s late favourite Magic Bus, with a pulsing club-ready beat continued through Isabella, and synth backdrop which leaps back across the pond straight into a 90s nightclub in James’ legendary stomping ground of Manchester. Though the song is of Atlantic proportions, the dizzy metaphors of the lyrics are immersive and opaque enough to lose yourself in and just escape.
This need for escapism is definitely present in All The Colours Of You. We need to stare the world in the face, but James know that sometimes music also needs to take us somewhere else – especially now. Single Beautiful Beaches is an exemplary moment of combining nightmarish current events (just in the UK, it harks back to the beaches filling up last summer with blasé holidaymakers ‘taking their chances’ with the pandemic for a moment in the sun, though the track is inspired by the California wildfires) and turning it on its head. It’s terrifying to picture, but somehow Beautiful Beaches also shimmers with laissez-faire euphoria. It feels almost morbid to call it festival-ready, but it does just beg to be sung along to, and the same is true of much of All The Colours Of You, despite the darkness of the subject matter.
James have excellently blended their aptitude for writing bangers that shoot straight to iconic status with the moral need of bands to observe and reflect the world around us. It would be easy to say it feels effortless – James certainly have the prowess to nail it, and they have done, but every part of All The Colours Of You doesn’t feel effortless, it feels carefully considered and meticulously put together. James are world-class stalwarts of the indie scene, and on All The Colours Of You they prove why they have remained so since their conception as a band – they’re responsive. James consistently create top-quality music, but they keep growing in necessity and sensitivity.
All The Colours Of You is out tomorrow.
