搬运译NME评The 1975专辑A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships
搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：Nina Wang
审校：Ryan-Chopin
这群男孩对《OK Computer（好的，电脑）》（Radiohead的摇滚名专）的提问交出了千禧一代的答案……
Matty Healy always said the first three 1975 albums would tell a story: his own, from teen dreamer living in an affluent hinterland of Manchester (2013’s self-titled debut) to pop star in the first flushes of fame (2016’s ‘I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It’) and the Ziggy-ish conclusion to come.
过去Matty Healy总说，The 1975的前三张专辑将会讲述一个完整的故事：他自己的故事——年轻时梦想着住进曼切斯特的富人区（2013年同名处女专辑《The 1975》），成为流行歌手后初享成名的喜悦（2016年《I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It（喜欢安睡时的你因为你不知你有多美）》），以及即将完成的自我总结。
Instead, The 1975 took to the studio to produce not one but two albums, the first of which is ‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relations’, with the second, ‘Notes On A Conditional Form’, to come next year. And this third album doesn’t just tell the story of Matty’s maturation as promised, it touches on modern politics, our relationship with technology and the entire Millennial experience, too. In doing so, it alights on bubblegum pop (‘TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME’), glitchy electronica (‘How To Draw / Petrichor’), balladry (‘Be My Mistake’), neo-jazz (‘Sincerity Is Scary’), trad jazz (‘Mine’) and all points in between.
然而这回，The 1975却一次性做了两张专辑，《A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relations》和预计于明年发布的《Notes On A Conditional Form（有关条件式的小贴士）》。第三张专辑除了Matty所说的成熟外，还涉及现代政治，人与技术的关系和千禧一代。这张专辑风格多样，包括泡泡糖流行乐（“TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME”）、噪音电子乐（“How To Draw / Petrichor（怎么画／雨后泥土芬芳）”）、民谣（“Be My Mistake（我的错）”）、新爵士（“Sincerity Is Scary（真诚令人害怕）”）和传统爵士（“Mine（我的）”）等等。
If this is the continuing story of Matty Healy, things have either been going right on course or falling apart, depending on your preferred flavour of rock star. This is the album on which Matty’s self-destructive tendencies have taken hold, the cocaine psychosis of 2016’s ‘UGH!’ swapped for the rock clichés of heroin addiction, rehab, therapy, windswept solitude in a Northants residential studio and sun-drenched isolation in LA.
如果说这张专辑反映了Matty Healy的生活轨迹，那么说他走上坡也好，走下坡也罢，总之取决于你喜欢什么类型的摇滚明星。Matty的自我毁灭倾向日趋明显，从2016年关于可卡因性精神病的歌曲“UGH!”开始，到这张专辑中这类主题占了大部分：海洛因毒瘾，戒毒，治疗，在北安普敦郡居民区工作室里一个人面朝大海的生活，在洛杉矶的阳光中感受寂寞。
It’s a rich run of life experience that informs the album in surprising ways, not least ‘It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)’, a ‘Pretty In Pink’-style power-pop banger that sings dreamily about heroin as if it were a great lost love (“All I do is sit and think about you / If I knew what you’d do / Collapse my veins wearing beautiful shoes / It’s not living if it’s not with you”). It’s funny, clever and refreshingly honest, and it’s not even the most confessional thing here – that would be a toss-up between ‘Be My Mistake’, a heart-wrenching, guilt-sodden song about on-tour loneliness and infidelity, or ‘I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)’, the massive closing track, which is so personal and intense it might just leave you in tears.
这张专辑凝结了丰富的人生经历，尤其是“It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)（这不叫生活（如果没有你））”。这是一首强力流行乐，却以红粉佳人的朦胧姿态歌唱海洛因，饱含恋人离去的悲痛不已（“All I do is sit and think about you / If I knew what you’d do / Collapse my veins wearing beautiful shoes / It’s not living if it’s not with you（我终日坐着思念你／谁曾想到你心狠手辣／我的血管败在你脚下／没你就不叫生活）”）。这首歌聪明有趣，有着令人耳目一新的真实，但在这张专辑里却不是最诚恳的，起码还有“Be My Mistake”和“I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)（我总想离开这个世界（有时））”，前者讲述了旅途中百般聊赖而出轨，由此引发的痛彻心扉和后悔莫及，后者作为专辑的最后一首歌，关乎个人倾诉，感情之强烈，让你听完后可能泪如雨下。
So on the one hand it is a personal album about Matty’s experience, but it’s also an album about love in all its forms (even for delicious opiates), love being the thread that links its genre-hopping tracks. And there’s a macro scale to the album, too, one that holds a mirror up to society as well as to Matty’s pretty fizog. The towering ‘Love It If We Made It’ stands and points, aghast, at real-world horrors that have somehow been normalised, most jarringly “a beach of drowning three-year-olds” and the words of the President Of The United States Of America, repeated verbatim, “I moved on her like a bitch“, casting no particular opinion and asking the listener to draw conclusions instead.
因而，这张专辑不仅讲了Matty的个人经历，还关乎爱，一切的爱（甚至是对美味鸦片的爱）。爱贯穿专辑中所有流派的音乐。此外，这张专辑映射社会，“Love It If We Made It（如果成功，那就享受吧）”一曲剑指现实生活中被“正常化”的骇人惨状。“a beach of drowning three-year-olds（海滩上三岁儿童溺水身亡）”令人悲痛，美国总统原话“I moved on her like a bitch（我像碧池一样压在她身上）”不断重复。对这些问题Matty在歌中不做表态，希望可以引起听者深思。
As the album’s intermission, ‘The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme’ is a poem narrated by Siri (yes, the one that lives in your pocket), a Vonnegut-like allegory about loneliness, data, social media and internet addiction, concerning a man, SnowflakeSmasher86, and his friend, The Internet. “When the man got sad, his friend had so many clever ways to make him feel better / He would get him cooked animals and show him the people having sex again / And he would always always agree with him,” it goes.
“The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme（爱上机器人的男人／爱情主题）”这首歌让听众在听到专辑中间时得以喘口气，借用Siri（没错，就是你口袋里的那个Siri）的声线，讲述了一个叫SnowflakeSmasher86的男人和他的朋友在互联网上的故事。歌曲充斥着孤独、数据、社交媒体和网瘾，活像一篇Vonnegut的讽刺小说。其中唱道：“When the man got sad, his friend had so many clever ways to make him feel better / He would get him cooked animals and show him the people having sex again / And he would always always agree with him（当他悲伤时，他的朋友总能变着花样让他笑／给他煮肉，给他看性爱视频／他从不怀疑）”
It’s easy to see ‘The Man Who Married A Robot’ as the album’s ‘Fitter, Happier’, and it’s not the only moment in which ‘A Brief Inquiry’ begs comparison to Radiohead’s 1997 masterpiece ‘OK Computer’. That record, also the band’s third, took a gloomy view of modern life when the internet was a luxury few had access to. Two decades later, The 1975’s album, written from the perspective of four digital natives, doesn’t so much condemn the march of technology, information and social media so much as accept it and debate it. It’s a nuanced record for a time when life’s shades of grey are darker and closer in contrast than they may have previously been, and it’s no less powerful as a result.
我们不难看出，“The Man Who Married A Robot”就像“Fitter, Happier（更健康，更幸福）”，而且《A Brief Inquiry（快问快答）》与Radiohead 1997年的神作《OK Computer（好的，电脑）》的联系也绝非仅此一处。在互联网还是大众难以企及的奢侈品之际，Radiohead乐队的第三张专辑《OK Computer》便对现代生活做出了消极评价。二十年后，The 1975这四个数字时代的公民交出了这张专辑，他们没有过分谴责科技、信息和社交媒体的进步，而是先接受再争辩好坏。在这个时代，生活比以往更是阴霾密布，而这张专辑之所以震撼人心，也正是因为它不同于时代的细微之处。
And from those greys, colour. Electronic flourishes to revel in. Gospel choirs to lift the soul. Every song offers an unexpected treat: the lovely ‘Surrounded By Heads And Bodies’ skips into a time-shifting drum beat where a chorus would normally sit; ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ is Kanye-level in its virtuosic use of autotune; ‘Inside Your Mind’ blends ‘90s post-rock with torch-song balladry and ‘I Couldn’t Be More In Love’ is a pitch-perfect 1980s wedding song pastiche, one of a handful of numbers that are so wilfully big, bold and emotional you expect upcoming tours may require six encores to bash each of them out with the appropriate gravity. Perhaps the biggest surprise comes in the form of ‘Mine’, a Cole Porter-influenced jazz number that evokes golden era Hollywood, Disney soundtracks and finger-clicking crooners while reflecting wryly on modern life (“I fight crime online sometimes / I write rhymes I hide behind,”), a jarring dissonance that feels like hearing a song you’ve known your whole life for the very first time.
而在这阴霾中，七彩曙光正在绽放。电子音乐的激昂让人狂欢，神圣的合唱让灵魂升华。每一首歌都有独特的惊喜：“Surrounded By Heads And Bodies（周围遍布头与身体）”在本应进入副歌的地方接了一段击鼓，听起来就像时空突然错乱；“I Like America & America Likes Me（我爱美国&美国爱我）”中自动修音的精妙运用达到了Kanye的水准；“Inside Your Mind（你的脑海里）”结合了90年代后摇和悲情民谣；“I Couldn’t Be More In Love（我已无法爱得更深）”是80年代婚礼赞歌的完美融合，是专辑中少有的意境深远、无所畏惧、振奋人心的一首歌，这份随心所欲让你不禁觉得乐队可能需要再唱六遍才能舒缓地唱完全曲。
这张专辑最令人耳目一新的歌非“Mine”莫属。受Cole Porter影响，歌曲在挖苦现代生活的同时，能让人不禁联想到好莱坞的黄金时代，迪士尼的经典歌曲和伴随着敲击指尖的低声吟唱（“I fight crime online sometimes / I write rhymes I hide behind（有时我在网上生起事端／然后写下隐藏于心底的旋律）”）。这种对比鲜明而诡异，听着它感觉就像你头一次看懂自己的人生。
‘Mine’ is a breathtaking piece of work, and one of many here that proves that The 1975’s core songwriting team of Matty Healy and George Daniel are not just the most accomplished and creative duo working in pop right now but the closest thing we have to a present-day Lennon and McCartney, a pair whose golden touch makes them near-enough unassailable. Clever and profound, funny and light, serious and heartbreaking, painfully modern and classic-sounding all at the same time, ‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships’ is a game-changing album, one that challenges The 1975’s peers – if, indeed, there are any – to raise their game.
“Mine（我的）”一曲激动人心。毫不例外，这首歌证明了The 1975的核心作词团队Matty Healy和George Daniel在当前流行乐界首屈一指的才华和创造力，就像披头士里曾经的Lennon和McCartney这对黄金拍档默契的配合坚不可摧。《A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships》 是现代痛苦和经典曲风的完美结合。凭借其精明而深奥、风趣而平实、严肃而触动人心的创作，这张专辑把游戏局势翻了一翻，让对手们——当然，如果有的话——除升级外无路可走。
《A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships》是流行乐坛的巨作，是专属于这个时代的大杂烩，Healy透过他的人生经历，巧妙地总结了千禧一代的生活。牛油果、房价、安全空间、爵士手，专辑中每一个你听到的玩笑都是一件艺术珍品，反映了这个最迷茫的时代中这代人的成就、智慧和人情味。这群男孩不一般呐！
