Individual songs that don’t quite hit the mark could be forgiven, I suppose, but the real failing of This Is All Yours lies in its pacing.

The Miley Cyrus experiment is incredibly offbeat even in comparison to the rest of this stuff, but that doesn’t make it inherently better than most of it, I’m afraid. The ingredients are all there, but the execution feels a bit rote. But even a lot of this record’s upbeat tunes feel out of place and pale in comparison to the best stuff from Wave. I’m not saying that a band like Alt-J should feel the pressure to be all rhythmic or all instrumental bombast, all the time.

A lot of them just felt like half-asleep acoustic noodling, with only a few tantalizing hints of the multi-instrumental deliciousness and choirboy vocal harmonies that had helped them to carve out such an identity for themselves. But no matter much I tried to pay attention to a lot of those calmer moments, they just didn’t have the same sort of texture or ambiance as tracks like the lovely “Bloodflood” and the trance-like “Taro” that closed out Wave so beautifully. “Maybe this one will be a grower”, I rationalized after going through the emotional whiplash of getting lost in one of their trademark clanging rhythms and then suddenly struggling to hear much of anything going on throughout a long swath of uncharacteristically quiet brooding. They weren’t doing it for shock value or anything.Īnyway, the full album arrived not long after that, and my first listen was massively disappointing, quite unlike my first trip through An Awesome Wave, which had its mellower moments that needed to grow on me, but to which I honestly never had a negative or even lukewarm reaction. The very idea made me cringe, but I tried to keep an open mind, since the worst a little bit of Miley was bound to do in Alt-J’s world was add to the surreal nonsense they were already concocting. But then along came the first single from their follow-up record, This Is All Yours, and it was built around a vocal sample from none other than Miley Cyrus. Alt-J demonstrated so much promise on their debut An Awesome Wave, a record that pretty much had me at hello with their offbeat combination of chamber pop and dorm-bred psychedelic indie rock. Well, it looks like the old sophomore slump has bitten another once-promising band. There’s being experimental and “out there”, and then there’s being languid and lifeless, and they spend too much of this record doing the latter while thinking they’re doing the former. In Brief: Coming from a band with such a strong sense of rhythm and so many fun quirks, This Is All Yours turns out to be a surprisingly disjointed and frustrating record to listen to.

Alt j an awesome wave zip