Released on 4 April 2025, "Open Season" was the second studio album from the Brighton-based English band, British Sea Power now known as Sea Power. It showcased a more accessible, mainstream sound and
reached No. 13 in the UK Albums Chart.
Almost all of the songs on the album were recorded with Mads Bjerke,
who had previously worked with the band on their 2003 album, The Decline of British Sea Power and mixed by Bill Price, with the exceptions of "Please Stand Up" and "North Hanging Rock", which were produced and mixed by Graham Sutton
and engineered by Phill Brown. "Oh Larsen B" was recorded by George
Apsion and Tariq Zaid Al-Nasrawi.
Two singles were released from the
album, "It Ended on an Oily Stage" and "Please Stand Up".
British Sea Power have followed a clamorous post-punk debut with an
album of unexpectedly gentle new-wave guitar pop that touches on, to
name a few, early Cure, the Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, David Bowie,
the Psychedelic Furs, and, most blatantly, Bossanova-era Pixies.
While the entirety of this unvaried but engaging sophomore album hasdthe nostalgic feel of 80s new wave gone arena rock, it's "Like a
Honeycomb" that really tips British Sea Power's hand. The track recasts
the Talking Heads' anti-consumerism screed "Once in a Lifetime" as
make-out music for a middle-school prom, transmuting stark synths into
arena-folk strumming and stepping all over the chorus, lyrically and
melodically.
Same
as it ever was: British Sea Power's accessible new sound wasn't
conjured out of thin air; these same pop melodies lurked under the
distressed surface of their debut. Open Season inverts The Decline of British Sea Power's ratio of melody to dissonance, weaving thin threads of discord through sunny expanses.
This second album came more limpid and beautiful piece of music than you
might expected all was serenity, beneath lambent piano
chords and graceful arcs of feedback, you can just make out the
twittering of birds and the crunch of leaves underfoot. Frontman Yan's
voice had a beatific whisper: "Drape yourself in greenery, become part of
the scenery." He's singing about death, but he could be singing about
Open Season itself. It seemed British Sea Power attempted the most
awkward trick in rock: broadening appeal beyond cult-dom without
sacrificing uniqueness.
But that
uniqueness is beyond doubt. Other bands may shared British Sea Power's
musical influences - artful post-punk angularity, the Pixies' squalling
guitars, the unsettling, Wicker Man end of English folk - but none
shares British Sea Power's obsession with the arcane corners of modern
European history, their penchant for dressing in puttees, their
willingness to decorate their stages with foliage and stuffed birds.
British Sea Power counted as
the first rock band in history with a pronounced interest in
birdwatching and rambling
If their debut, 2003's The Decline of British Sea Power was less an
album than a kind of aural assault course. It contained beautiful,
elegiac songs. To reach them, however, you had to navigate tracks
apparently designed to send all but the most committed listener fleeing
in fear of their life, including the doomy cod-Slavic harmonising of Men
Today Together and Apologies to Insect Life, which largely consisted of
the line "Oh Theodore, you are the most attractive man" screamed
repeatedly with mounting dread and hysteria.
Two
years later, common sense seemed to have prevailed. Open Season bowls up
bearing a surfeit of interesting songs "It Ended On an Oily Stag", "Be Gone and Please Stand Up"
offered epic pop decorated with vast, effortless choruses; True Adventures
is a delicious ballad, slowly devoured by gusts of guitar noise. "Oh
Larsen B", meanwhile, was the catchiest song ever to concern itself with
the fate of a collapsing ice shelf: "You're fractured and cold but your
heart is unbroken," gasps Yan. "My favourite foremost coastal Antarctic
shelf."
It was a fairly good and engaging album, Open Season came with optimism attached, this album showed other ways to make music at the time and that was the triumphant lesson in sweeping gracefully towards the mainstream with
your imagination and mystery intact, in becoming part of the scenery
without jettisoning the desire to drape yourself in greenery, and by maintaining their singular
aesthetic while venturing into more inviting pop sounds, the weirdest
band from Brighton just might have become the smartest.
Open Season Track List:
1. It Ended On An Oily Stage
2. Be Gone
3. How Will I Ever Find My Way Home?
4. Like A Honeycomb
5. Please Stand Up
6. North Hanging Rock
7. To Get To Sleep
8. Victorian Ice
9. On Larsen B
10. The Land Beyond
11. True Adventures
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