What I love about Everything Everything’s lyrics is that they seem nonsensical, ridiculous. It’s only when we delve into songs like Photoshop Handsome and read the opening verse that we can find something else in this four piece from England.
“Airbrush!
What have you done with my father?
Why does he look like a carving?
How do I live in the present?
I make my own density?”-
From ‘Photoshop Handsome’ off the album ‘Man Alive’
I’ll show you why I see Everything Everything as such an engaging group even though they bring such a new style to their audience
These words literally talk about tools in the Apple photography editing software Photoshop and their effects. Is that the message that was intended to be sent out? Or is there another meaning behind these odd words, like Yuck talking about getting over a wall when we know that there’s more to them than this. They don’t quite go as far as disguising their feelings for drugs with a woman, something a band like Radiohead would do.
What Everything Everything are trying to say is that we can’t trust anyone any more, that nothing is what it first turns out to be, like the documentary Catfish, where a man is enticed into a relationship with a woman he meets on-line only to then find that his whole relationship was forged. Perhaps the song is a reminder that there are people out there who could be looking at our private virtual conversations, like our emails, calls and text messages.
The way that you portray yourself as a band is not purely through lyrics, or music, but can also be through the artwork in the CD. The image of a fox in a pink liquid facing the moon facing what looks like the image on a television breaking up. The artwork suits the band perfectly, a completely strange and pretty much meaningless picture (not that Everything Everything are meaningless).
What catches the ear about Everything Everything is their work on the keyboard and the lead singer, J0nathan Higgs’s almost permanent full setto voice. What you’d also notice quickly is how romantic their music is (not as in ‘roses are red’ romantic, but as in musically romantic), they range their tempo, dynamics and their feel from charismatic and energetic to when they perfect those melancholy endings.
Tell me, what do you prefer, a band who portray their feelings in another form, like Radiohead, or the straightforward way of telling people how you feel through music?
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Ethan.
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