Bastille - "&"
Ambition & Execution
The biggest downside to this project — this exploration-turned-review blog thing that is Versatone — is just how frequently I now forget things. Trying to keep up with the origins and styles and stories of literally hundreds of artists, not to mention what makes each one special, gets to be a challenge. Bastille, for example, is easy to mentally write off as just another mainstream Pop Rock act.
But then Dan Smith & co go and drop this enormously ambitious thing with incredible lyricism off in front of you, and it’s this eye-opening reminder of why I try to cover everything I can, even when in my head a band is marked as middling. I can’t tell you why I came into this with that impression — maybe it’s because “Icarus” has grown a bit stale to my ears; maybe I just don’t like how Smith’s accent comes out in his vocals. I thought I was just including this because I know they’re a group my wife loves.
But & (pronounced “Ampersand”, which is how I’ll refer to it for the remainder of this review), Bastille’s fifth full-length album, is much deeper, more robust, than I could have imagined it to be when I added it to my list.
Now, full disclosure, those of you who don’t like Pop Rock, Pop Folk, or any blend of them, will likely not enjoy the album’s sound all that much. If you can’t get past that, you won’t be able to enjoy the album for what it is, regardless of how impressive the scope may be. I, personally, found the album’s sound growing stale on full listens; so I think this one will ultimately play better on playlists.
The first thing you’ll notice upon looking over Ampersand’s tracklist is that every title — every single one — includes an ampersand. At first glance, it’s an amusing little gimmick. But it’s also the root of the album’s inspiration. As Smith tells DIY in a lengthy interview, he originally penned “Bonnie & Clyde”1 and “Leonard & Marianne” during the pandemic, then says, “I guess I must’ve seen them written down together with the ‘&’ in the middle, and thought, ‘That’s really interesting.’”
With the subsequent completion of “Marie & Polonium”, the album’s conceptual foundation was set. Now finalized and released, its fourteen tracks wind through legends, literature, and history, retelling and reimagining stories (with one exception) during its 51-minute runtime.
The exception is the album’s opening track, “Intros & Narrators”, which takes the time to suggest that the album’s narrator, sung by Smith, may not be reliable. Indeed, that’s part of the point; while Smith and his historian friend, Emma Nagouse, spent a lot of time researching stories and historical figures (and their stories), there are some very intentional twists included throughout the album.
I should also pause a moment here to note that the pair have been hosting a weekly podcast, called “Muses: An Ampersand Podcast”, to discuss each song and its inspiration in-depth. They started these back in mid-september, and they’re up to eleven hour-long episodes.
The first of these aforementioned twists comes immediately in the album’s second track, “Eve & Paradise Lost”. In this slow-crawling acoustic retelling, Adam and Eve both ate the fruit; but out of love for him, Eve shouldered the burden of the blame. The song serves as solid commentary regarding the patriarchal trend of blaming women for getting pregnant despite that it takes a man’s participation as well.
The album continues on by refuting Emily Dickinson’s reclusive reputation, then using Edvard Munch’s mental health recovery and the subsequent stylistic change in his painting to illustrate a hopeful turn in the climate crisis, then waxing wistful in the mind of Leonard Cohen as he thinks back on his relationship with Marianne Ihlen. Marie Curie, Oscar Wilde, Zheng Yi Sao, and Narcissus all get songs, among several others.
Tracks 9, 10, and 14 (“Drawbridge & The Baroness”, “The Soprano & Midnight Wonderings”, and “Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024”) all provide pseudo-exceptions from the structure of the rest of the album:
“Drawbridge & The Baroness” is based on a story/philosophical exercise about a Baroness who disobeys her husband and dies as a result. This story is also sometimes used to, metaphorically, describe systemic racism.
“The Soprano & Midnight Wonderings” features BIM, and the song is actually part of her story. The song’s description on Apple Music is basically the only detail I can find on this track:
“I thought people could do with a break from my voice for a minute on the record, so this track features BIM, who is a fantastic vocalist that has toured with us for many years. It’s a story from her life that we wrote together on tour and then finished at my house. It felt really important for her to sing it since she’s such a beautiful artist.”
Frankly, BIM does give the best vocal performance on the entire album on this track.
Finally, “Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024” is about a woman who was the subject of a poem which Smith’s father wrote in 1977. He was touring America, and was in San Francisco, on Telegraph Road, when he saw her. Something about the encounter stuck with him, and clearly the poem had an effect on his son.
The album is, ultimately, an impressive collection of stories. The biggest weakness here is that Smith works within a pretty rigid framework — ten of the album’s fourteen tracks fall within a thirty-second length delta (3:30-4:00), and of the four outliers, only closing track “Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024” exceeds the top end of that range at 4:07. Within the songs, a lot of time is ‘wasted’ on repeating the chorus and non-lexical vocalizations.2 There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s a tradeoff between making the song fit into a more “standard” or “traditional” song structure for the sake of accessibility, versus granting oneself more leeway to really let the story take the lead in the songwriting.
And while I, a huge Prog nerd and a poor poet,3 prefer unshackling from what would be considered typical or accessible, I have to admit that Smith did a great job, generally, of making each word count so that the stories and their meanings clear.
I’m genuinely impressed with the ambitious scope of the album and its execution. There are definitely a few songs which I find to be unimpressive, musically (“Leonard” and “Essie”, for example), but also several which are, frankly, incredible (“Blue Sky”, “Marie”, “Mademoiselle”, and “Zheng Yi Sao” stand out the most).
Scoring this one isn’t going to be as simple as I had thought.
Rating: Teal Blue
“Bonnie & Clyde“ did not make the final cut of Ampersand, but there are indications that the song will be released in 2025, likely through an extended version of the album as a bonus track.
This is fancy terminology for “ooo”s and “la la la”s. That’s it.
I’m better at fiction. I’ve never been good at “concise”. “Brevity is the heart of wit” is why I’m never described as “witty”.