Possible the greatest achievement of Brighton's British Sea Power is to have something approximating a stable, modest, and a normal career. Viewed fondly by the music press but never hyped to the heavens, making accessible music but clearly unburdened by the desire to write a hit, eccentric but never preposterous, their three previous albums proper have each scored strong reviews and incrementally higher chart positions and fourth set Valhalla Dancehall seemed profoundly unlikely to buck that trend.
Mixing the sort of luminescently sinister ballads that have stood the band in good stead throughout their career with chaotic, colourful smears of guitar rock, this was an album that neither treaded water nor reinvented the wheel. Instead, it saw the band continued their stately, unruffled progress. On tracks like "Who's in Control?", "Georgie Ray" and "Living is So Easy" the band warped the music to match the words; stormy, elastic squalls of incandescent sound that lack the hooky polish of the band's early material, yet seethe and churn with greater force.
Valhalla Dancehall’s opening track, "Who's in Control," retained most of the previous record’s intensity and landed somewhere between the Clash and Arcade Fire. But the song, as it turns out, was something of a red herring: it’s not so much that this record was a radical change in sound from the last one, more that it's kind of stylistically all over the place. There were some tracks that wouldn't have sounded at all out of place on Rock Music, but there were also nods to the revved-up punk of their 2003 debut and more hushed balladeering than any of their previous work.
Even when British Sea Power blowed their sound up to stadium proportions, this album did not feel forced. The way the hazy production blends softens the overdriven guitars on some of the louder tracks on Valhalla can make a lot of these songs run together, but there’s no denying that "Georgie Bay" and "Observe the Skies" there were fine pieces of songwriting. It was the ballads, however, that truly shone here. The gorgeous "Luna" showcases Yan's airy, breathy voice, which, as it turns out, is more well-suited to the ballads than the rockers. The standout track is "Living is So Easy," a likeable pastiche of mid-'80s Cure and mid-'90s U2.
The early part of the record succeeded largely because it doesn't stick with one sound for too long, but too many mid-tempo tracks towards the end—including the unnecessarily 11-minutes-long "Once More Now"—made the record feel longer than it is, which was a shame, because an album with this many winners shouldn't feel like a chore to listen to.
For many, the diversity in sound worked to British Sea Power's advantage, but it also left the album feeling weirdly unsatisfying. It’s not that any of this is bad—quite the opposite, actually—but this record doesn't feel as complete as their others.
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