Maxïmo Park
Our Earthly Pleasures
Release Date: May 8, 2007
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Record label: Warp
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Album Review: Our Earthly Pleasures by Maxïmo Park
Exceptionally Good, Based on 2 Critics
Based on rating 4.5/5
Review Summary: Our Earthly Pleasures is a dense record; twelve tracks clock in at little more than forty-one minutes, but it’s a shattering listen from start to finishThere’s something genuinely beautiful about Geordies singing in harmony. Maybe it’s the novelty factor, the once-in-a-lifetime meeting on Tyneside of two people capable of holding a tune, I don’t know. It works, don’t overthink it.Yet it’s hard to put a check excessive thinking when faced with Our Earthly Pleasures, the follow-up to Maximo Park’s acclaimed 2005 debut A Certain Trigger.
Based on rating 4/5
Like 2005's A Certain Trigger, Maxïmo's second album is dominated by singer Paul Smith's Oscar Wilde-type persona: a sensitive soul driven to dementia by daily life, lust and vodka. Lyrically, though, he has upped his game. Effortlessly dispensing marvellously suggestive lines ("Did we go too far? Is that why your nose is bleeding?"), Smith is able to ponder the environment, literary pretensions, monogamy, warfare and loneliness, all within a couple of verses.