Blue Weekend Pitchfork乐评搬运+拙译
原文地址： https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolf-alice-blue-weekend/
作者： Ian Cohen
发表日期： JUNE 17 2021
翻译：Index（翻译若有不当之处，请指正）
The UK band’s enormous third album is pristine and emotionally extravagant, the platonic ideal for contemporary big-tent rock music. 这支英国乐队庞大的第三张专辑质朴而又情感奢侈，是当代大帐篷摇滚音乐的理想柏拉图式。
Not everyone has the energy, confidence, or money to be among the crowd at Glastonbury or Primavera, playing Tetris with the festival sc hedule, shuttling between three different stages trying to catc h the best 10 minutes of every set. Wolf Alice’s extravagantly emotive third LP, Blue Weekend, is a safe substitute for the experience, not just for 2021 but for virtually any year between 2017’s Visions of a Life and now. Blue Weekend is fluent in both alt-rock and the domain of pop artists that are most likely to headline alt-rock festivals. They’re the platonic ideal for big-tent rock music in 2021: lead singer Ellie Rowsell gives 20-somethings the megaphone of a superhuman, working through vices, crises of confidence, and a pervasive misogyny that success has only worsened, upending UK lad-rock supremacy while staying firmly within its lineage.
在Glastonbury或者Primavera音乐节上，按照音乐节的时间表玩俄罗斯方块，在三个不同的舞台之间穿梭，就为看上每组最精彩的10分钟表演，不是每个人都有这样子做的金钱、精力和勇气。Wolf Alice情感丰富的第三张专辑《Blue Weekend》是这种体验的安全替代品，不仅适用于2021年，还适用于从2017年的《Visions of a Life》到现在的几乎任何一年。对于另类摇滚音乐人和最有可能成为另类摇滚音乐节压轴的流行艺术家来说，《Blue Weekend》的风格模式绝对不陌生，它是2021年大帐篷摇滚乐的理想模式: 主唱Ellie Rowsell为20多岁的年轻人提供了超人般的扩音器，帮助他们改正不良嗜好、克服自信危机和一种普遍存在的厌女症——这种厌女症只会牢牢地保留了自己的血统，然后进一步恶化，颠覆英国少年摇滚的霸主地位。
Blue Weekend makes ample use of the big Wolf Alice jukebox. When the negative space is flooded with reverb, Wolf Alice flaunt the glitziest production values ever heard on a shoegaze album; turn the reverb down and they’re a more guitar-centered version of big-budget bedroom-pop. “Safe From Heartbreak (if i never fall in love)” is Wolf Alice’s entry into indie-adjacent, twang-free country-pop; strip away the floodlit harmonies that make Rowsell sound like a one-woman Staves and the 12-string overdubs and it’s an Elliott Smith song.
《Blue Weekend》充分利用了Wolf Alice式的大点唱机。当负空间充斥着混响时，Wolf Alice炫耀着从shoegaze专辑中提取到最特别的制作方式——把混响关小——在所有预算充足的bedroom-pop音乐里，它是一个更以吉他为中心的版本。《Safe From Heartbreak (if i never fall in love)》是Wolf Alice深入独立音乐领域、没有鼻音的乡村流行音乐作品；如果去掉Rowsell女性化的、闪亮的The Staves式12弦配音和声，这就会是一首Elliott Smith的歌。
But if there’s any overarc hing pop culture trend defining Wolf Alice’s ex-istence, it’s how they repackage ex-isting IP to reflect modern sensibilities. This is where Wolf Alice’s impact feels most distinct: Rowsell eyerolls her way through “Last Man on Earth,” whic h variously recalls Bowie, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd as she mocks the mythos of male genius that animates classic rock boosterism. “Smile” barely conceals its disdain for critical condescension as the band works through a funk-metal groove that could serve as the theme song for a gender-flipped reboot of Entourage.
但是如果说要用流行文化的什么总体趋势来定义Wolf Alice的存在，那就是他们如何重新包装现有IP以反映现代的情感的方式。这就是Wolf Alice影响最为显著的地方: Rowsell用她的眼神重新描绘了《Last Man on Earth》 ，这首歌让人想起了Bowie、the Beatles和 Pink Floyd，她无情地嘲笑了男性的天才神话，这种神话赋予了经典摇滚乐队生命。《Smile》一点儿也没有掩饰自己对批评家傲慢态度的蔑视，乐队演奏了一首放克金属歌曲，这首歌可以成为性转版《Entourage》的主题曲。
In the context of popular alternative rock, Blue Weekend is inspiring, maybe even life-c hanging for anyone who hears “Smile” alongside bands like Royal Blood or Catfish and the Bottlemen. But Blue Weekend can seem a bit circumspect compared to their Dirty Hit labelmates. The 1975 or Rina Sawayama’s eclecticism is far messier and riskier and no matter where it takes them, they never leave any doubt whose song it is. Three albums in, Wolf Alice still lack a quintessence that immediately establishes a song as Wolf Alice rather than bending to its influences first. Rowsell can sell the feeling of being inelegantly wasted on “Play the Greatest Hits” (“I leave the present empty/But I make it gift wrapped”), but similar to Visions of a Life’s “Yuk Foo,” its foray into a noise can feel a bit tokenized.
在另类流行摇滚音乐的语境下，《Blue Weekend》是鼓舞人心的，对于听过《Smile》，以及一直听像Royal Blood、Catfish和the Bottlemen一类乐队的人来说，它甚至能改变人生。但是，考虑到他们的Dirty Hit标签相比，《Blue Weekend》似乎有点谨慎。The 1975和Rina Sawayama的折中主义要混乱得多，风险也要大得多。不管他们走向何方，他们音乐独特特质从未让人怀疑。在已发行的三张专辑里，Wolf Alice仍然缺乏那种可以立马创作出Wolf Alice式歌曲的一种精髓，而不只是笼罩在它的阴影下。Rowsell 在《Play the Greatest Hits》(“i leave the present empty/But i make it gift wrapped”)中的表现可以做到，虽然在这首个里，它被浪费掉了，但和《Visions of a Life》中的《Yuk Foo》类似，突然闯入的噪音会有一点象征性。
On “Delicious Things,” Rowsell dips into a husky lower register to outline a debauched stay in Los Angeles. It all turns on one brilliant final line where Rowsell calls her mom to check in, taking “Delicious Things” out of the realm of musical tourism and into a sad and very human drama; as she takes ownership of her capitulation to the illicit charms of various party favors and wolfish bullshit artists, “Delicious Things” proves the endurance of basic Hollywood fantasies for people who should probably know better.
在《Delicious Things》里，Rowsell低声说出了她在洛杉矶的放荡生活。这来源于Rowsell最后一句精彩的歌词，她打电话给她的妈妈，让她把“Delicious Things”从音乐之旅中移除，这让歌曲变成了一部悲伤的、非常人性化的戏剧。当她向各种派对宠和亚逼艺术家的犯规魅力妥协时，《Delicious Things》证明了好莱坞幻想的持久性，对于那些或许应该更了解情况的人来说。
For all of its obvious ambitions towards creating a “cinematic” scope—quoting Macbeth on opener “The Beach,” ending with “The Beach II,” and fitting a loose breakup narrative in between—Wolf Alice work more on an episodic level, each track creating a specific mood easily separable from the whole. That’s not really a figure of speech—with no way to road test these songs, the band played them against muted YouTube clips to see if they got the vibe right. Blue Weekend always nails the vibe, they nail everything, but often in a way that sounds micromanaged. It’s easy to scapegoat the fussy production of Markus Dravs, which leaves Rowsell like so many of our gifted and versatile actors vying to stuff themselves in a CGI bodysuit for Marvel. But if Blue Weekend sounds too big to fail, he’s doing his job. This is the guy bands call to get that extra boost from “Mercury Prize nominee” to “Grammy winner”: The Suburbs, Viva La Vida, those first two Mumford & Sons albums, Florence and the Machines’ How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, all of which sound like GarageBand scratch tracks compared to Blue Weekend.
尽管明显它有着打造电影氛围野心——从开场白《The Beach》中引用 Macbeth的话，到以《The Beach II》结尾，并在两者之间采用松散的分手叙事——Wolf Alice的作品更多的是情节层面的，每首歌都有这样的情节性。这其实不是一种比喻，因为没有办法实地测试这些歌曲。乐队将歌曲放进柔和的YouTube视频片段里，看看感觉是否正确。Wolf Alice总是抓住了氛围，他们抓住了一切，但是以一种“微观管理”的方式。很难不把Markus Dravs的繁琐制作当成替罪羊，它使得Rowsell像我们许多有天赋、多才多艺的演员一样，争相为漫威穿上CGI紧身衣。但是如果要让《Blue Weekend》听起来宏大，又不能失败，那么他做对了。这就是那些从“水星奖提名者”到“格莱美奖获得者”的“男性”乐队所需要的额外推动力: 《The Suburbs》《Viva La Vida》、Mumford & Sons的前两张专辑、Florence and The Machines的《How Big，How Blue，How Beautiful》，所有这些都比《Blue Weekend》听起来更像GarageBand的刻录音轨。
There’s one exception tucked away towards the end, enough to question the album’s entire approach. “No Hard Feelings” mostly consists of Rowsell’s voice backed by bass guitar and almost nothing else—none of the triple-tracked vocals, no guitarmonies, no bleats of synthesizer or Sistine Chapel reverb. Not that it lacks for drama: Rowsell spends the second verse heartbroken in a bathtub, listening to Amy Winehouse, trying to siphon the pain in her music as her own. A few lines later, she realizes “there’s only so much sulking the heart can entertain,” and “No Hard Feelings” emerges as an unusually mature and forward-thinking breakup song.
有一个例外是隐藏在最后的，足以让人推翻对整张专辑看法的歌曲。《No Hard Feelings》主要由Rowsell的低音吉他伴奏组成，几乎没有其他内容——没有三重音轨的人声，没有吉他，没有合成器的嗡嗡声，也没有西斯廷教堂式的混响。这并不是说它缺乏戏剧性: Rowsell在浴缸里伤心地度过了第二小节，听着Amy Winehouse的歌，试图把歌曲中的痛苦变成自己的来吸干。几句台词之后，她意识到“There’s only so much sulking the heart can entertain”，于是《No Hard Feelings》成为了一首异常成熟和前卫的分手歌。
But nothing less than a masterpiece was to be expected of Wolf Alice’s third album. That’s just how it goes for a certain kind of artful and ambitious British rock band, even if they hadn’t respectively earned a Grammy nomination and the Mercury Prize with their first two. Look, I don’t make the rules, the British press do, and their handiwork has already placed Blue Weekend on a critical echelon occupied by the likes of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and To Pimp a Butterfly. You can’t blame anyone for going overboard at a time when Wolf Alice are ever so close to returning to their natural habitat playing to great lawns across the globe, yet the only thing that seems to prevent them coming off like the biggest band in the world on Blue Weekend is that they also want to be every band in the world.
无论如何，Wolf Alice的第三张专辑绝对是一部杰作。就算他们头两支专辑没有分别获得格莱美提名和水星奖，他们也还会是这种英国摇滚乐队的风格。看，规则不是我制定的，是英国媒体制定的，媒体的评论已经把《Blue Weekend》放到了关键梯队上，这个梯队上有《My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and To Pimp a Butterfly》。Wolf Alice离它们的自然栖息地如此之近，他们却在世界各地的大草坪上嬉戏，当然，你不能为此责怪任何一个人。然而，唯一阻止他们在《Blue Weekend》中成为世界上最大的乐队的，似乎是他们也想成为世界上的每一支乐队。
