Album of the week: The Maccabees, Given to the Wild

These days, this formerly fallow period presents an opportunity to be grasped like a New Year’s Resolution before the usual hurly burly takes over and good intentions wither on the vine. In short, it’s a good time to release an album if you want to get noticed.

Record companies have locked on to the seasonal associations with fresh starts with a campaigning vigour. As music fans restock their iPods, new artists are heavily promoted via the BBC’s Sound of… poll and the Brits Critics Choice Award. Meanwhile, existing underperformers are politely pushed for your consideration, albeit without the aggressive unction and the luxury goodie bags of the film industry come awards lobbying season.

And so the mild-mannered Maccabees are strategically positioned as this year’s candidates ripe for breakthrough. On paper, their trajectory is exemplary. In five years, the South London quintet have progressed steadily from humble beginnings as nine-stone indie weaklings living up to their public schoolboy image to a band maybe sort of likely to, before arriving at this would be zeitgeist moment, when they finally deliver the commercial payload with their tactical third album and go where British Sea Power failed to take us.

Are you too cool for Coldplay? Too befuddled by Radiohead? Think Arcade Fire have sold out now they’re playing castles and headlining festivals? Then try The Maccabees for all your banal pseudo-leftfield indie needs. There’s no danger of anything as brazenly commercial as a tune on this frustratingly nebulous collection which simply takes up the baton previously held by Vampire Weekend, Bloc Party and all those other so-called alternative bands who mistake a riff here, a jam there for songs. Any old Hugo, Felix or Rupert can do that.

Given To The Wild is the kind of album that wants you to feel its importance without ever really delivering the goods. The Maccabees won’t go down the U2 stadium grandeur route because that would be way too vulgar and grasping, right? Instead, they have been allowed to indulge their, for want of a better term, experimental ambitions to produce a moodier vein of epic, with mild proggy inflections but nothing to alienate the average Elbow fan. Seatbelts on, it’s going to be a fairly long, reasonably repetitive but occasionally scenic ride.

Following the scene-setting intro of the wispy title track, the journey begins hopefully with the elegant, undulating Child, a cohesive slice of mood music, with mellow jazzy brass to wallow in and the delicate voice of Orlando Weeks, which supplies texture and emotion throughout the album where otherwise there would just be an anonymous wash of ambient mulch.

The tranquil sound is lovely as it is, but the band can’t leave it at that – got to show progression, dynamics – so the track picks up in the second half, motoring along breezily with some burnished guitar breaks.

Likewise Slowly One, where the plangent Pink Floyd spaciness gives way to blustering guitar distortion which, once unleashed, just hangs around unsure of how to whip up the desired majestic maelstrom.

Feel to Follow charts a similar course, with fragile vocals and MOR piano overtaken by Afro-influenced guitar picking before breaking into an ambient prog sprint with Steve Howe-style guitar noodling. But from here, the album falls into abstraction with the aimless keyboard arpeggios of Ayla and the wouldbe expansive blandness of Forever I’ve Known and Heave.

The single Pelican, charged with bearing The Maccabees chartbound, comprises two partially formed song ideas spliced together – a blunt, urgent hookline and a softer, more dream-like interlude which is rudely cut short before it can get under the skin. As the track rushes to its conclusion, it’s like being eagerly ushered towards some underwhelming pay-off - an impression which holds for much of the album.

Glimmer is as superficially shiny as its title, but Went Away has substance – there’s an energetic synergy of motorik momentum and descending guitar figures before the inevitable spreading of wings in the final stages, plus some sweet crooning from Weeks with his conventionally romantic invocation to “hold me close, don’t let me go, I need you so”.

It’s not quite their lighters/cameraphones-aloft moment. Instead, the unleashing of their inner Coldplay is saved for the final track, Grew Up At Midnight. But this road to revealing their arena potential feels too laboured, given the musical longueurs en route. Good luck to The Maccabees, but I’ll stick with The Black Keys’ El Camino as the soundtrack to rev into the new year.

Rating: ***