To Gild the Lily: to improve or decorate something that is already perfect, and therefore spoil it. (Cambridge Dictionary)
To say this is a bold choice of idiom to invoke in naming an album is an understatement up there with the Spartans’ famous reply to Philip II of Macedon:
“If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.”
“If.”
Now there don’t appear to be any armies involved here, nor any cities to raze, but there is an album to review, and one that invites comparison to a somewhat unflattering idiom, no less.
The first thing to take in about this album because it’s front and centre from the off, is that there are many competing styles in play here. There’s kooky, off-kilter 80s alt vibes, heavy gurgling synths, what sounds uncannily like 90s indie rock, soul-inflected vocals that could be straight out of early 90s R’n’B, some pretty post elements, a bit of goth lurking in the darker corners, and an overall sound that doesn’t appear to have decided what it wants to be yet.
New Miserable Experience’s own view on the matter is that they’re “carving a distinct lane between heavy music, alternative synth-rock and melancholic pop”, which is an ambitious combo-breaker to say the least. The alternative and melancholic strands are immediately obvious, with multiple tracks taking us back to the alt-flavoured 80s – ‘Heartsick’ and ‘Ordinary People’ both sound like forgotten new wave/romantics numbers – and there’s a general thread of melancholy running throughout. Pop and rock are also both here in different ways: there’s an underlying poppy strand underlying a lot of the album, and where it fades out the gap is frequently filled with a distinctively 90s indie rock bent, which at one point combines with the synths to sound not unlike early Muse.
The heavy and synth bits are where New Miserable Experience are on a less solid footing. This is partly because – frankly – there just aren’t really enough of either, especially if you’re coming at Gild the Lily from the angle of enjoying either of them more than the melancholy alt-rock parts. The synths, especially, are gorgeously brittle, bubbly and distorted in places, but just as it sounds like we might be getting something satisfyingly nasty, New Miserable Experience take their collective foot off the gas and go somewhere else. Which is great if you like the more dominant elements of this album, but anyone listening to this looking for filthy, dirty synths may be disappointed. That said, if they ever feel like keeping their foot on that metaphorical pedal, the groundwork for an excellent darkwave or industrial album is hiding in plain sight here.
“New Miserable Experience own view on the matter is that they're "carving a distinct lane between heavy music, alternative synth-rock and melancholic pop", which is an ambitious combo-breaker to say the least.”
The heavy angle has a similar but different set of issues; there isn’t really enough of it, and it takes different forms across the album. The two heaviest tracks, ‘Yours to Bury’ and ‘Perfect Things’, are heavy in very different ways, as ‘Yours to Bury’ focuses on distortion and comes out somewhere near the denser end of God is an Astronaut, whereas ‘Perfect Things’ is more straightforwardly the poppier end of metal, with elements of metalcore if anything. As with the synths, if this is the angle you’re coming from, there isn’t quite enough here to sink your teeth into, but what is here is pretty good.
With so much going on musically, ultimately it’s relatively telling that the parts of Gild the Lily that work best, are the ones where one or two strands have been developed, and everything else settles into the fringes. Pulling multiple disparate musical threads together into a coherent whole has always been difficult, and the proliferation of fusion and crossover styles that abound these days doesn’t actually mean that it’s got any easier, just that more people are attempting it. Where New Miserable Experience stop trying to shoehorn everything in, a competent retro alt-rock album emerges, which would be stronger without some of its existing moving parts.