The 1975 - Notes on a Conditional Form Review
By James Garbett and Sudipto Biswas
In mainstream music, it’s hard to find artists that churn out consistently creative and unorthodox content like The 1975. Every album with their laboriously long titles has tried to do something a little bit more unique than its contemporaries as well as trying to outdo its predecessor in terms of just sheer ambition.
So the highly anticipated: "Notes on a Conditional Form" is one that we at Run That Again were eager to hear, not only to see how Matt Healy and the rest of the band would approach their fourth studio album but also as the conclusion for this particular era of their music. So, how is it? It’s pretty great!
First of all, this album is ambitious, twenty-two track-long kind of ambitious and straight out of the gate, the band demonstrates a social awareness in track 1, which acts as a nice but perhaps slightly overindulgent message. We then jolt into “People”, loud, energetic and musically vivacious. It feels like a big, glorious, musical middle-finger. But just after we’ve settled into the rampant chaos of the track, we move into “The End (Music For Cars)", a beautifully crafted orchestral piece laden with timpani and harps plucked by angels themselves, it’s one of a number of tracks which feel remarkably cinematic which give NOACF a really unique finish, feeling like philharmonic interludes between the tracks.
There are tracks that are more reminiscent of the 1975’s earlier sound such as “The Birthday Party”, a track that has the sexiest sax solo we’ve heard in quite some time, there's still a personal and touching feel to proceedings perhaps best heard when Healy’s lyrics become a stream of consciousness, akin to modern poetry (trust us, the good kind).
We noticed a great switch in the second half of the album with a smorgasbord of heavy-hitting, well-produced tracks with unpredictable beat switch-ups and insanely slick guitar riffs. "If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)" is the band with a retro Bruce Springsteen filter and we love it.
“There’s a real beating heart there, even if it may not be the most radio-friendly, but then when has the band ever cared about that.”
We’d be remiss not to mention “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America”, perhaps our favourite track on the record. It’s slow, gentle and nothing short of goosebump-inducing with the wonderful vocals of Phoebe Bridgers and is also powerfully honest and confessional, which is perhaps the album’s greatest strength. Beneath all the various styles and tones, there’s a real beating heart there, even if it may not be the most radio-friendly, but then when has the band ever cared about that.
Of course, this album could quite easily merit a much longer track-by-track breakdown and we still wouldn’t be able to write everything we wanted to. “Notes on a Conditional Form” is great and if you’re a 1975 fan, you’ll be happy with the inventive and diverse ways that Matt Healy and the gang have taken their music and if you’re not, you may just be a fan by the time you’ve finished listening to it.