Maxïmo Park
Nature Always Wins

“A Certain Trigger”, the debut of Maxïmo Park, dating back to 2005, was received extremely positively by specialized magazines, and the band led by the charismatic Paul Smith was hailed as the next big thing in Albion's post-punk scene. Already the subsequent “Our Earthly Pleasures” had divided critics, despite the palette of the then quintet having significantly broadened. Undeniably, the sophomore album of Maxïmo Park marked the group's shift towards a more alternative rock formula, which has since remained largely unchanged. The third “Quicken the Heart” represents the start of a slow decline in terms of quality. In the following albums, Maxïmo Park alternated political invectives with melancholic ballads, not always remaining inspired. The decision to embrace more electronic sounds further undermined the band, as evidenced by the less than refined synthesizers of the most recent “Risk to Exist”. After ten years of attempts and two original members lost along the way (bassist Archis Tiku and keyboardist Lukas Wooller), Maxïmo Park finally manage to deliver a light, enjoyable album that – something that is far from predictable for them – possesses a certain underlying coherence, both sonically and thematically.
The first approach to this “Nature Always Wins” can only be almost devoid of expectations, given their last disappointing studio effort. And indeed, in “Partly of My Making”, the opening mid-tempo, Paul Smith drags himself with a senile gait over an overwhelmingly electronic sound carpet, in no way fueling our hopes for the rest of the album.
But the awareness of aging bringing compositional maturity to the singer becomes evident in the more lively tracks, where every component is meticulously crafted. “All of Me” and “Why Must a Building Burn?”, the latter accompanied by a very personal text inspired by the tragedy of the Bataclan attack, are tracks of crystal-clear pop-rock, fully within Maxïmo Park's range. In the 44 minutes duration of the album, the group looks back multiple times, in both an autobiographical sense (“Meeting Up” cautiously treads ground already explored in some tracks of the fifth chapter of their career, “Too Much Information”) and in a more general sense (“Placeholder” is blatantly influenced by early R.E.M.), without the citationalism becoming unbearable.
In the context of an overall unpretentious album, some attempts miss the mark. Quickly forgotten is “Ardour”, a collaboration with Pauline Murray that attempts to introduce a punk element to the record. “The Acid Remark” doesn't leave an impression either, a bland collage that in the bridge resembles certain ballads by the Arctic Monkeys.
The themes dominating the lyrics of the remaining tracks are primarily love – a topic set aside in the previous “Risk to Exist” in favor of a more political approach to songwriting – and the singer's fatherhood. The only exception is the closing track “Child of the Flatlands”, Smith's homage to his homeland, which takes shape as a nostalgic idyll.