CD Review: The Sleepy Jackson, Personality

If you're going to rip off anyone, you may as well rip off the best. That's pretty much the thinking of Luke Steele, anyway, whose new album as The Sleepy Jackson, Personality, is so indebted to Brian Wilson that we imagine that he'll send the boys round at any moment.

And while The Sleepy Jackson are aiming as high as they can, Performance never quite managed to hit their targets, instead falling short and landing somewhere between Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips. But, hey, when has that ever been a bad thing?

Say what you like about Luke Steele - perhaps that he's a borderline dangerous unstable man who is capable of delivering live shows so bewildering awful that you're never quite sure if he's taking the piss - but he talks a good fight. Personality by The Sleepy Jackson, if you listen to Steele, is "to do with the sound Brian Wilson achieved with the Beach Boys… I wanted it to sound like jazz really, that feeling of the music blowing with the wind," which is just one of the gazillion times that Brian Wilson's name is brought up in reference to The Sleepy Jackson.

And when it works, it really works. The Sleepy Jackson single that preceded Personality - or, to give the album its full title Personality One Was A Spider One Was A Bird - God Lead Your Soul, was a gem of such impeccable magnificence that, for once, it felt like The Sleepy Jackson were living up to all their lofty comparisons. Still, after repeated listens, God Lead Your Soul still feels like a classic single, with a chorus so gigantic that it still leaves us short of breath to hear it. Surely, we thought, surely The Sleepy Jackson couldn't manage to make Personality into a whole album of that quality.

And we were right - they couldn't. But, after you've played Personality a few times to coax the magic out, it becomes apparent that they came pretty close. As you might expect from an album with a sleeve showing the lead singer standing topless at the summit of a snowy mountain in a ballroom holding a lifeless clone of himself solemnly in his arms, Personality by The Sleepy Jackson is an album that isn't afraid to be a little bit grand. Songs about God and the Devil and heaven and hell dominate here, and - sonically - the songs are soaked in choirs and strings and all kinds of orchestration.

That's one of the things that strikes you about Personality - every song is so overburdened with production that it's hard to distinguish one from another. While this approach, coupled with its thematic recurrences, lets the album sit together as a single body of work, it makes for quite a one-note album. Once you've realised that Personality's opener You Needed More sets the tone with its swathes of piano, brass, strings and million-strong backing vocals, the excitement can drop as another four minute slab of piano, brass, stings and million-strong backing vocals kicks in. And another. And another…

So it's fair to say that The Sleepy Jackson have only one good song. But it's a song that they can rewrite ten times, like they do on Personality, without prompting so much as a squeak of complaint. It's when The Sleepy Jackson do mix up the formula, however, that things go awry. I Understand What You Want But I Just Don't Agree is a nasty disco tune that sounds entirely out of place right in the middle of Personality, while Play A Little Bit For Love sounds like an outtake from Kate Bush's last album, and not in a good way.

Aside from those two missteps, though, Personality by The Sleepy Jackson is an album which, while never quite getting to where it wants to be, still manages more than most other albums we've heard this year. And at this rate we're expecting a masterpiece from Luke Steele in 2009.

Order Personality by The Sleepy Jackson from Amazon for just £8.99

[story by Stuart Heritage]