Reviewing music can be really easy sometimes. When a record is uncomplicatedly good or bad, it’s fairly easy to settle on how your feel on it overall. That makes it fairly trivial to marshal your thoughts into a coherent narrative with specific points to back up your takes. But a good critic can take the difficult task of exploring a more complicated outlook on an album and express it with the clarity it deserves.

It would be easy to say that Le Bone’s Pink & Brown is a good album. Opener Let’s Piss might have an awful title (I rolled my eyes when I first read it) but musically it comes out of the gate swinging. A swelling guitar melody emerges, almost like the start of a breezy racing game before seguing into tight, technical prog-metal riffing. Keyboards fill the textures out nicely as the mix of lead and choral vocals come together to build big hooks. There’s a fairly funky, bass-led breakdown section before a crescendo builds layers of instrumentation into another verse. These are all tricks that Le Bone use fantastically well across the album.

There’s certainly an embrace of musical weirdos across the record too. Creepazoid calls to mind Mr. Bungle, with its discordant, jarring stabs before moving smoothly into a huge chorus and some jaunty keyboard led quieter sections. Like all the best prog bands, Le Bone always have an unexpected section lurking up their sleeves. The title track opens on a calm flute led section and a very relaxed, pleasant female vocal which I could have gladly enjoyed for the full length of the song. When the more unhinged pace of the rest of the song explodes out of the calm, it’s just so satisfying and the transition into a full on 90s style dance banger is genius. I’ve been singing along to the “do the execution” hook all week.

God of Spaces is the best song on the record, though. It combines Le Bone’s undeniably great musicianship with excellent, cohesive songwriting that doesn’t quite materialise on the rest of the album. Everything flows smoothly together with some seriously heavy riffs hitting and a run time that doesn’t overstay its welcome. This is Le Bone’s masterpiece, but I can’t help but think it should have been the first track on the album, so the line “a clown show for no one” could act as foreshadowing.

It would be easy to say that Le Bone’s Pink & Brown is one of the worst records I’ve heard this year. The moment the third track, Fuck It, opened with an intro that I can only describe as circus music, I knew I was in for a bad time. All the momentum that had been built up by the previous tracks completely collapsed in a shift to wackiness. The entire song builds itself around this style, making it feel like an exercise in simply showing off how weird the band can be, rather than writing a song with any merit. This is topped off by the repeated delivery of “huh?” over the chorus in perhaps the most obnoxious tone I’ve had the displeasure to hear. At the very least the song builds a satisfying conclusion with an explosive crescendo… before it keeps going, straight back to circus nonsense with a group vocal that sounds like it was recorded with the regulars down the pub. Now, this particularly unpleasant lack of harmony might be deliberate, but it isn’t good.

Summit simply translates the bouncy circus vibes into more metal terrains and intersperses it with sections of fairly straight forward and unexciting prog-metal. Given that this follows the aforementioned God of Spaces, it once again kills all momentum that had been built up in favour of eye-rolling wackiness. I think it’s probably true that no other band sounds quite like this, but maybe Le Bone shouldn’t either. Even the strong chorus hook can’t quite save this track from its disjointed construction. The final track, Le Bone, is much of the same in approach but by the time I get to it on any given listen, I’m so exhausted that I am also scared of Le Bone, as the band sing on this track.

I have saved talking about the track Social life until the end for one reason. I can’t stand this song. It starts off strong with some big doomy riffs, intermingled with some spacey atmospheric sections. So far so good. Then after just a minute and forty seconds, the spoken word section comes in. I need to take a moment to divert from my musical criticism to talk about this section because it has been driving me insane ever since the first time I heard it. The spoken word passage is of the sort of pseudo-philosophical nonsense that gets spouted on podcasts by guys who have taken far too many hard drugs and really want you to think they’re smart. The ramble, which lasts for over a minute (despite feeling like five), calls into question whether the present exists. It is complete nonsense. It’s the sort of thing that should never see the light of day because it can, and should, only be greeted with three questions. “So what?”, “Why does this matter?” and finally “what the fuck are you talking about?”. It’s substance-less. It doesn’t provide any real insight into the world, or suggest a new way of thinking or an action to take, it’s merely questioning the language we use for the sake of it. So what if the present doesn’t exist and I have a potentially limitless number of past and future lives? Why should I care, what does it actually mean for me and you as individuals? What are you fucking talking about? It’s nothing, it’s pointless, not worth devoting your brain to it nearly as much as I already have. I don’t understand why this is in this song, unless it’s supposed to commenting that it’s the sort of thing you hear on a podcast and think “man, the person who’s saying this really needs a social life.”

As you can see, that one segment completely pulls me out of the song and the record as a whole. The song itself never really recovers to the heights it had before. No more satisfying riffs for the next four minutes of runtime, no sticky hooks, just unmemorable prog textures. Then we finally bring back a big riff to lead into the outro, but even that can’t save it.

While it’s easy to make each of those initial declaratory statements on their own, holding the truth of both of them inside you and trying to reconcile them is what’s difficult. Pink & Brown isn’t great. It’s also not completely worthless either. When it’s good, it’s really good. When it’s bad, I have an extensive crash out over how bad I think it is. Le Bone get in their own way by trying to be weird and wacky, rather than focussing on good tunes. There is a really good EP’s worth of material in here, I just hope that for future releases they focus on their strengths.