Meanwhile, Rockabye has everyone on the same page and working together to produce a singular effect, everyone being given well-defined roles which feed into the song’s central point. Clean Bandit have never really done this, and so are as much to blame for their songs never quite coalescing as everyone else. If you’re going to keep using guest vocalists, you might as well start adjusting your sound for each one. Which means that if Clean Bandit have a major flaw, it’s that they don’t write their intricate music to play to the strengths of their collaborators. This perspective implies that Clean Bandit don’t have any control over their guest artists though, which is almost definitely wrong: while I don’t know exactly how they write their tracks, I doubt that they just record the music, send it to the record label and then leave it to everyone else to add some vocals on top of it. Because I usually prefer the instrumentation to the lyrics in any Clean Bandit song, I have a tendency to argue that Clean Bandit is a great bunch of musicians being underserved by guest artists who don’t get what they’re doing.
The fact that this is rare for a Clean Bandit song says something about the band which I haven’t quite said yet. Everyone’s working together to highlight and bolster one element. To reflect this, every single element of the song other than Anne-Marie takes a supportive role to her vocals, from Sean Paul making singular utterances which highlight the important parts of Anne-Marie’s story to music which largely keeps itself out of the way unless needed. The entire track is about the hard work but ultimate self-sufficiency of Anne-Marie’s single mother character, providing a surprisingly deep portrait of how single mothers need more support but are still strong on their own. The thing that makes it work is that there’s an in-song reason for one performer to overpower the rest. You’d think that Rockabye, the song they did with Anne-Marie and Sean Paul, would end up criminally overloaded given that it features not one but two guest artists, yet it’s actually quite controlled. Too far to either end of the spectrum and you get stuff that doesn’t work: there’s a specific vocal style that serves Clean Bandit well, but it’s so percise that no-one quite seems to know what it is yet. Similarly, place it next to a wholly uncomplicated artist like Jess Glynne and you get music which is entirely unsupported by its lyrics, resulting in something unsatifyingly meaningless.
Place one of Bandit’s precise, complicated instrumentals next to an over-singer like Louisa Johnson and you get a track with no room to breathe, forcing their less ostentatious sound into the background and allowing the song to be dominated by it’s worst element. The issue is that they keep collaborating with their contemporaries despite them never quite seeming to gel. They’re certainly the best instrumentalists working in mainstream pop at the moment their songs sound sublime and are musically so far ahead of their contemporaries that it’s almost embarrassing. I’ve historically been a bit conflicted with Clean Bandit. Let’s pretend this song is still immediately relevant to the charts, yeah?
I’m way behind on my attempt to review every UK No.
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