British indie pop trio London Grammar (Hannah Reid, Dan Rothman and Dominic 'Dot' Major) have just released their sophomore album Truth Is a Beautiful Thing, three years after their promising debut LP If You Wait (2013). As promised, the trio have kept to their focus on matters of emotion while leaning towards a more varied soundscape. In March, Reid explained to NME that "The first album was a lot more about relationships, but then the second one is too – but in a different way. It’s probably about the relationship you have with yourself, rather than one specific other person. The relationship that us three had on the road, and there’s a lot about the meaning of life in general, which is SO lame, but that is what we talk about!”
After releasing the philosophical "Big Picture", the piano-driven title track and the sparse "Rooting For You", the trio return to their signature form with "Oh Woman Oh Man" - which is also accompanied by two intertextual music videos. While the "Oh Woman" video has Reid take up most of the screen time, its "Oh Man" counterpart focuses on her male love interest: a photographer who claims Reid as his muse.
Reid's dramatic and expressive voice is evenly matched by the track's cinematic and orchestral instrumentation, emphasizing the grandiosity of her commitment to recuperate a flailing relationship:
'But I'll always have a thing for youI'd move the earthBut nothing made you want me betterThere is nothing I can doBut steal the moonBut nothing made you want me better'
Lyrics: Genius
The chorus elevates her personal struggle into biblical and literary realms (the last two lines are a possible reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest), and further emphasizes the Darwinian imperative of establishing an enduring bond between the sexes:
'Oh woman oh manChoose a path for a childGreat mirrored plansOh woman oh manTake a devil by the hands throughYellow sands'
