(Quick disclosure to start – BGH’s Glenn Fosbraey was my course leader throughout my Creative Writing BA with the University of Winchester. He asked if I’d be interested in reviewing this new album and I enthusiastically accepted.)
Is it any wonder that power pop strikes a resounding major chord with so many? Fashions may change, but generations of teenagers have found solace in big, blunt, blistering hooks and longing lyrics, all adding up to songs which satisfy your sweet tooth even as they tear your heart in two.
Now University of Winchester lecturers and power pop fanatics Daniel Ash and Glenn Fosbraey (aka BGH) have penned their own love letter to the genre, debut album We’re Too Awkward to Say Hello, which ‘fuses classic songwriting with the desire to leave social engagements at the earliest possible opportunity’. It’s a suitably timeless theme, but is We’re Too Awkward a comforting nostalgia trip, a blast into pop’s future, or something else entirely?
For a start, the opening track is called ‘The 80s’, though it kicks in with a riff more redolent of the grungy rockers that blew in over the Atlantic a decade later. Crashing between styles with lively impatience, the music may take its cues from American bands, but the lyrics shun the sanitised retro culture peddled by ‘stuff like Stranger Things’ for the dismal British realism of ‘rottweilers in cages’ and ‘yellow grass in parks’.
Not that the future seems much brighter for BGH, with ‘Absolute Half-Life’ shaking its head at the difficulty of escape from our pathologically flippant society. If that sounds grim, it’s far from it. When its heavy Pixies bassline hands over to a decisive chorus as melodic as anything the Monkees penned in their prime, you start to hope that humanity will climb out of its Twitter-addled pit and pull itself together after all.
Still, on ‘1961’, BGH allow themselves a drop of straightforward yearning for the past, and the result is an unbelievably catchy morsel of pop perfection. ‘Now I am older, I wish it was 1961 again,’ Fosbraey sings in-character as one of the album’s many alienated souls before exuberant doo-wop backing vocals fling the song’s energy levels into the stratosphere.
Fosbraey and Ash are both long-term scholars of songwriting, and it shows on the brilliant ‘Geiranger’. There aren’t many songs that recall both Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ and the Beautiful South’s ‘Don’t Marry Her’, but ‘Geiranger’ makes such an unlikely fusion work in spades.
As Ash’s fey vocals flitter over a sports-stadium stomp, the song’s picturesque setting (the Norwegian village of the same name) is undercut with tales of scatological accidents and manky sexual encounters. That may not sound like Top 10 material, but you’ll be humming the sugary refrain for days.
Then ‘Geiranger’ crashes straight into the puppy-dog hooks of ‘Tracy Blue’, the softest, lightest, most radio-ready track on the album. There’s a reason why power pop provides the pulse of so many coming-of-age films, and ‘Tracy Blue’ rattles through a catalogue of teenage tropes – acne and body odour sitting against mixtapes and infatuation – while staying as truthful as it is tuneful.
But BGH show that they’re capable of complexity as well as simplicity. Theatrical prog-pop gem ‘Can I say something to you?’ may clock in at under three minutes, but it carries the stylistic sweep of 10cc, Electric Light Orchestra, or even 90s neo-psychedelic wizards Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. And, as it shifts from swirly to gnarly in its final verses, it proves that the duo can really rock.
The album brims from front to back with riffs you can jump up and down to, and ‘Chief Brody’ is a prime example. Described by the duo as ‘an ode to the inevitable night of celebration following the events of the film Jaws’, it’s also a darkly heartwarming pop-punk toast to the movie’s hero, with a rousing chorus which boasts a serious bite force.
Connoisseurs of maritime cinema need not content themselves with this track alone. In cathartic cruncher ‘The Lighthouse’, Fosbraey and Ash draw a line from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the eponymous Robert Eggers film to a hopeless dream of ‘a life that never came’. Even so, for a brief moment in our protagonist’s past, a better future seemed as within reach as the cursed beacon of the film’s climax. Maybe that’s the real pain of nostalgia; the terrible knowledge of what could have been.
This subtext simmers under the surface of We’re Too Awkward’s social discomfort from start to finish, only to keep on erupting in unexpected ways. ‘Jack Said “OK”’ appears to paint a picture of a man trying to find himself by going on the run, but whether it makes him any happier is far from clear. The music roars along with pummelling urgency until you too feel you are being pursued by whatever is snapping at Jack’s heels.
‘Little White House’, however, could scarcely make for a stronger contrast. Although another portrait of everyday isolation, it’s not a blast of punk energy but an intimate, Lennonesque acoustic ballad. Its lo-fi fuzz couches a liltingly sad tune and lyrics which capture, with vivid specificity, the dilapidated small geographies of English streets and all the lonely people who inhabit them.
For all their bleakness, these images of ordinary Britain are loaded with affection and triumph, and it’s this glowingly, knowingly positive note which BGH leave us on. Closer ‘The King of Foundry Lane’ is the nearest thing to an epic here, given the album’s short length, and appropriately enough its young hero is a self-styled big fish in a ‘land of opportunity and DFS sales’ no matter how few surprises his repetitive existence may hold.
As the song swells from a soothing introduction to a chorus which could fill a festival field, taking stimulating psychedelic detours along the way, the result wouldn’t be out of place on Parklife or even – yes, I’ll say it – Abbey Road. If the South of England ever had an answer to ‘Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight’, this might as well be it!
Like the very best work of Squeeze’s Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, We’re Too Awkward to Say Hello proves that feelings don’t need to be simple to be strong and that some sentiments shine best when they’re expressed through character and image rather than pleading introspection. But with something to say to everyone, it doesn’t sacrifice power pop’s boundless empathy for a second. Whether you’re spotty or sporty, a cool kid or a nerd, a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, or a criminal, you can never be too awkward for We’re Too Awkward.
We’re Too Awkward to Say Hello is out now on all major streaming platforms
Follow BGH on Instagram
Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by Hayden Kearney and Tom Maquez
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