The most striking thing about Biffy Clyro‘s unprecedented propulsion from underground heroes in the early noughties to the cultural icons that they’ve become, is that with every album they’ve released, they’ve maintained serious credibility. There never was a ‘Biffy backlash’, which is especially interesting when you consider exactly how far they’ve come since the days of ‘Blackened Sky’. There was a small and dedicated army of fans back then when they were just three lads from Ayrshire playing angular alt-rock on the UK’s toilet circuit. Four albums later and Biffy are household names, radio favourites and massive unit-shifters. Their rise to success has been staggering. ‘Only Revolutions’ honestly feels like the album that they’ve been striving their whole career to write – it’s magnificent, and it shows Biffy as a band wholly deserving of their current praise.
Whether it’s the classic Biffy riffs that are the driving force for the likes of ‘Shock Shock’ and ‘Boom Blast And Ruin’, or the orchestral theatrics of ‘The Captain’ and ‘Mountains’, this is a record as varied as it is grandiose. When they slow things down in ‘God And Satan’ and ‘Know Your Quarry’, Simon Neil’s voice is fragile and beautiful, yet he still manages to scream the walls down when necessary in the appropriate chorus. Unsurprisingly, there’s a pleasing stench of the Marmaduke Duke influence on ‘Only Revolutions’ and where it’s most apparent in ‘Born On A Horse’, the Scotch threesome have written arguably their best song to date. With a shamelessly ghetto bassline propelling the track, building up to a typically Biffy-esque chorus finale, it’s quite a landmark song for a band that originally started out playing Nirvana covers in the mid-nineties.
With ‘Only Revolutions’, the whole thing feels like a production – it’s a record that begs to be played from start to finish, and it’s the sort of record you want to see the band perform in its entirety, too. Ultimately, it’s a near flawless entity (you may find yourself skipping over the comparatively dull ‘Cloud Of Stink’) that cements Biffy Clyro as one of the most innovative and continually exciting bands around today. Generations to come will be reading the name Biffy Clyro in the musical history books, and ‘Only Revolutions’ may very well become their defining album.
Andy R