Too Much Information

Too Much Information sounds more like a collection of tracks from different moments in their career than a fully cohesive whole but perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing.

There are a lot of words in this, their fifth album, and yes, they have always been a literate band, but here it often seems somewhat forced.

It can be straightforward, but more often than not on Too Much Information it’s actually quite clever.

In Too Much Information, they’ve made easily the most interesting and eclectic album of their career--they just didn’t quite include enough of those heartwarming hooks to make it their best.

The album feels like a grab-bag of the band’s process, but not a cohesive expression of their craft.

Maximo’s strength has always been in scorching post-punk anthems (“Our Velocity”, “Graffiti”) and hyper-literate melancholic balladry (“Acrobat”, “This Is What Becomes of the Broken Hearted”), which work so well when bolstered by Paul Smith’s erudite lyrics and uniquely accented delivery. They pull off the former on “My Bloody Mind” and the latter on the excellent “Leave This Island”, but elsewhere the hooks and melodies rarely match the frontman’s grasping literary pretensions.

The overhaul, surely, needed to be much more far-reaching. [Mar 2014, p.88]

The problem is that there is too little to dig into, to revel in. In many senses, Too Much Information is ultimately not enough. [Feb/Mar 2014, p.73]