Everything Everything – Get To Heaven

An imposing return from one of Britain's best pop bands...

It's hard not to have sympathy with Everything Everything.

Yeah, their last album, 'Arc', went into the album charts at number five. Yeah, said album garnered them three Ivor Novello awards (that's the award your discerning musician most wants to win, after all). Yeah, frontman Jonathan Higgs is quite the creative songsmith (witness 'Feet for Hands', a paean to the experience of PC David Rathband, shot and blinded by Raoul Moat, for a prime example). But – and it's a big but – such successes only brings with it the expectation of further success.

It seems that for Everything Everything, the way to do this is to do what they've always done, but bigger, better and more artfully. With the production assistance of Stuart Price (The Killers, Pet Shop Boys, Madonna), there is a Big League sheen to much of this record which, mercifully, at no point saps the band's wildly abandoned creativity.

One thing's clear, though; for all the glitchy, widescreen pop majesty on display in songs such as 'Blast Door' or 'No Reptiles', things remain lyrically imposing. On the latter track, we're told "I'm going to kill a stranger, so don't you be a stranger". Charming. "I don't wanna get older" pleads Higgs, on the otherwise extraordinarily summery 'Spring/Sun/Winter/Dread'.

But, aside from worrying for a band being able to pen and deliver such lines with such disarming conviction, all is forgiven when the album breezes past in a joyous blur of glorious technicolour pop. That such truly intelligent, even challenging, music is on the cusp of being well and truly blasted into the popular consciousness of an entire nation is truly wonderful.

"Do you wanna know how far you've come? Do you have any idea?" asks Higgs on 'The Wheel (Is Turning Now)'. Even though this is not a wistful song about the trajectory of his band, one wonders whether, at some point in the making of 'Get to Heaven' the members of Everything Everything did, indeed, stop to consider what has brought them to this point in their history. Even bigger and better things are to come for Everything Everything. Right now they are Britain's best pop band.

9/10

Words: Haydon Spenceley

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