Which is worse: a bored group, or boring songs? On their fourth album Up!, Ultimate Painting can’t quite be bothered to transcend either designation. The sound falls somewhere between fellow London downers The Clientele and Australian jangle pop outfit Dick Diver, but with the former’s crippling melancholy rendered largely blasé and without a full commitment to the latter’s sweet, wounded exuberance. It’s odd that such an instrumentally sparse, casually sung set would be dense, but both qualities create a blend that at once lulls and obscures. That Up!, originally slated to come out on Bella Union, will never see a proper release due to the group’s February break-up is fitting for a record whose tantalizing embers refuse to spark.
The seventh track, “My Procedure,” exemplifies these feints at engagement. To say it bursts out is to exaggerate, but thanks to a tenuous line of tightrope-walking guitar girded with spacious bass, a whirling conclusion doesn’t initially seem out of the question. The song, however, drifts by on a formal, minimal drum kit and a numbing veil of light distortion, slowly building towards a disorienting, whispered half-release. In similar fashion, the opener—and decidedly not a Beta Band cover—“Needles In My Eyes” pushes off with a warm strum and sighing Christopher Owens-esque intonations, but doesn’t get much further. The hushed, lackadaisical vocal layering portends intimacy but ultimately creates a detachment that lingers throughout the album.
By the time “I Am Your Gun” strolls in, Up! could’ve been on for three hours or five minutes. And that’s track three. This almost unshakeably reserved mood is the album’s operating standard. For the most part, Up! is a lukewarm bath: not exactly unpleasant but decidedly not comfortable. When keys and guitars are allowed to break the aimless malaise with a few soaring bends and slides, they universally fail to punctuate.
Even the more immediate “Not Gonna Burn Myself Anymore” pulls up at the end, decelerating its twinkling guitars behind a winding, simple synth line. In nearly every song, this refusal to let the listener in creates the album’s only true tension. “Take Shelter” also sounds poised to break the claustrophobic proceedings when it hops out at a relatively quick clip. Underlined with a ringing organ and honest-to-god thrusts of guitar (power chords? Maybe!), Ultimate Painting finally provides a groove worthy of shoulder dancing. Unfortunately, as another strained if forgivably endeavouring guitar solo tugs the track to an end, the album returns to its constricted daydreaming with an indolent shrug.
It’s not, therefore, the aforementioned outliers that offer Up! any elevation. Indeed, without breaking the album’s preferred shambling stride, “Lying in Charles Street” bears the most fruit from this commitment to languid dissociation. As frontman Jack Cooper’s narrator fades through a sensory checklist, an effectual, differentiated hook actually breaks out of its ambling introductory guitar lick. Tension is built and released via smooth tempo changes, the laidback momentum doesn’t deflate, and, eight tracks in, an elegant construction is finally given a relatively unmuddled song structure. The song shows what the band could actually accomplish within their self-imposed parameters—labored playing, heavy-lidded lyrical sketches and all.
The problem with Up! isn’t the hungover, river-float pacing. Amiable contemporaries like New Jersey’s Real Estate are just as apt to wander around in a noodly fog. The problem is that (even by the attempt to enunciate) Up! could have been so much more. The potential for a neat blend of psychedelia, 1960s British folk, and Flying Nun-style catchiness is hinted at throughout, but never quite crests the doleful apathy from song to song. All half-hearted crescendo, little climax. The sharpest chorus offered, “Don’t waste your time / and forget about me”, is only prescient in retrospect, but also offers a rare moment of clarity, and perhaps self-explanation, in an otherwise unsettled, ambivalent meander of an album.