Album Review: Only Revolutions by Biffy Clyro

Earnestness in music is often embarrassing, terminally uncool, and inherently absurd. How can anyone with a completely different set of morals, experiences, and hopes to a singer ever truly feel their moments of earnest expression? It’s easy to merely identify with earnestly sung words, but presenting heartfelt music leaves you open to mockery from those that mistrust the straightforward, and dismissal from those that balk at whatever statement is being made so sincerely. Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil is emphatically unbothered about offending the anti-earnest on his band’s fifth album.

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Biffy Clyro are a three-headed hairy rock beast from Ayr. Despite their name - a nonsensical stoner in-joke - they've been stealthily making inroads into the rock mainstream for a decade. They're a product of that peculiar Scottish condition: Celtic exuberance rattling against Calvinist understatement and industriousness. Granted, the trio started life in thrall to Nirvana, but their first three albums carved an assured niche.

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There's something heartening about a band following an old-fashioned trajectory of slogging it out for a few years before pushing on to the big leagues. Like Muse, who just kept getting bigger before anyone noticed that they were playing two nights at Wembley, Simon Neil and the Johnston twins are now officially a Big Deal. Only Revolutions is an album that should only reinforce that notion.

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