Bombay Bicycle Club is a very unique—and uniquely complex—pop group. A series of three albums over as many years, supplemented by a handful of singles and EPs, brought BBC a slow rumble of appreciation in its native England. By rights, the band’s fourth album ought to be the one that brings it the recognition that’s so far eluded it in the U.S., because So Long, See You Tomorrow (Vagrant) is, even on first listen, an LP that announces a sea change in a group’s approach, in the vein of Revolver or Pet Sounds. That’s high praise, but So Long is, among other things, the most sonically complex of all the band’s records. BBC—guitarist/vocalist Jack Steadman, guitarist Jamie MacColl, drummer Suren de Saram and bassist Ed Nash—will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on the band.
MacColl: Earlier this year I read Alone In Berlin by Hans Fallada, and it affected me very deeply. I’ve always been very interested by the Second World War, but this was the first time I’d read a book about history from the backstreets of Nazi Germany. In the book a perfectly ordinary couple in Berlin who have lost their son to the war and decide to leave subversive postcards dotted around the city. This is a book about small acts, acts of resistance so small that the protagonists are left wondering whether they had any effect at all. Yet it is the small acts, invisible to so many, which create patterns that slowly subvert the brutal acts of Nazism. Alone In Berlin is a bleak read but one that a life-affirming one nonetheless.
Video after the jump.
