Written by: Dave Cantrell

There is an engine inside The Monochrome Set. Joining the glowing tubes and the snaking wires, buried back in its innards behind a screen projecting an endless mirage of salt’n’pepper images and the grainy scratch of a speaker that seems to always sound of a film reel Churchill speech, a little engine with an indomitable spirit and a percolating heart drives The Monochrome Set like, well, a well-oiled machine. To many this almost petulant ongoingness can only be explained by some kind of hoo-doo sorcery or, failing that, a secret source of miracle mechanical energy, a vitamin shot comprised of nucleotides and Kryptonite fed intravenously through one of its many cables. Nearly none, by this point in TMS’s long and faithful run – a run betokened, one might add, by a maddeningly consistent level of meticulous pop consistency – even bother with the more quotidian, yeoman’s explanation of simple hard work and grit. And yet, loathe though we are here at SEM to knock those loftier, more cosmic notions out of the sky, it is that latter option, dull and workmanlike though it may be, that accounts for both this Set’s almost unnatural longevity and the deft suasion of the sound it (still) makes.

When the only real critique of the new album Cosmonaut – the band’s thirteenth full-length released September 9th on Tapete – vis-a-vis first LP Strange Boutique that emerged at the feverish height of the original post-punk explosion in 1980 is that there’s nothing on it to quite match the brimming fresh insouciance of “The Lighter Side of Dating” or “Love Goes Down The Drain” while containing plenty to rival the likes of “The Etcetera Stroll” or “The Puerto Rican Fence Climber,” you must be doing something right since the amount of bands still extant that could claim a comparable connection vitality-wise to their 36-year-old debut can be counted on the fingers of a handless man. Factor in the not inconsiderable fact that the only reason those original TMS standards cast such large shadows is primarily down to the very fact of them being so utterly fresh to everyone’s ears back then – in terms of buoyancy and wit and the recklessly pristine musicianship to go with it, few aside from XTC compared – and the story grows more remarkable. Creative Stamina has seldom if ever invited its traditional enemy Musical Quality along for the entirety of its (most often, in most cases, spirit-depleting) ride.

Despite bumps along the way – a couple of hiatuses of varying years (1985-1990, 1998-2010 with a 30th annie show tucked into 2008), Bid’s aneurysm in 2010, a large and twisty-limbed family tree of personnel changes as might be expected – the roots of The Monochrome Set, as evidenced here, remain as unshakable as ever, the band’s adeptness, their mischief and sparkle undiminished. While the lineup has shifted subtly since last album Spaces Everywhere – the titanic Lester Square departed after its recording, replaced by returning member John Paul Moran; please try to keep up – much of the sustained praise we lavished on that record could be copy-pasted here without a seam to show for it. The title track, literally bounding out of a theremin intro, thrums with an airy persistence atop a Burundi/Bow Wow Wowed rhythm turn, adds some psychy Byrdsy guitar flourishes and a solo flashing with brilliant space age economy to lyrics spun with an exacting galactic whimsy – Bid’s voice, I swear, unaged – and ends up putting it all together like it’s the tightest little pop nugget to ever weave two notes together. But, y’know, this is The Monochrome Set so what’s new.

“Suddenly, Last Autumn” goes the popsike route with Dick Daled embellishments to give it that road trip feel, the suave pop froth of “Put It On The Altar,” due its warm organ constancy and the chipper sass of some female backing vox, sports a swinging soul groove to which the listener is asked to provide a cool snapping of fingers. “Stick Your Hand Up If You’re Louche” adopts, counter-intuitively perhaps, rockabilly TMS-style, the sound of which we’re sure you’re already hearing in your head, “Fêle,” busy of beat, springy and lush of structure, is so deliriously organ-heavy – one might think the Steve Nieve of This Year’s Model suddenly materialized in the studio – that even the rhythm guitar starts to sound like a chording Farfisa, while “Monkey Suitcase” pulls the neat parlor trick of morphing from the borrowed chunk of “Purple Haze” it starts with into an instant Mono Set staple complete with a gliding melodic hook of a chorus, craftily arch, absurdist lyrics (“and in the sun you could see through my hair, there’s birds in there“), and the usual-for-them balancing of the odd chord change here and there.

The fact that the album ends with a number (“Lost in My Own Room, Dreaming”) that takes as its template the chase-sequence tempo of “Paint It Black” – spruced up and goosed, of course, by an injection of adrenalized lounge dynamics – that’s no less than an impressionistic take on the singer’s stint in hospital those short six years ago, lyrics heartfelt, immediate, and sharply elliptical as is the Bid way, is both wildly surprising in a way and wildly unexpected in another, Because this is, after all, what we count on The Monochrome Set for, a finessed lurch and a pop savvy swerve between those two poles, and on Cosmonaut they execute that dance with a customary high-wire grace like a band of pop rock Nuryevs. Why they’re not more widely hailed is, to be honest, an embarrassment for our culture at large.