Mon. Sept. 10 

 “We’re in a global recession and everyone is being bombarded with bouncy, happy music,” says Maximo Park singer Paul Smith. “The nation is out of control and the record [‘The National Health’] is about taking back control, and being a force for change in your own life. It can’t speak for everybody but it has its eyes and ears all around us. That’s always been a Maximo Park thing: look at yourself. See how you relate to yourself and hopefully someone else will have something in common with it. Our songs are built on empathy. I would hope it’s as vital a music as people would want to hear.”

   The Manchester, England quintet, which formed in 2001 and released their first album in 2005 is back in America, at the Middle East Downstairs Monday Sept. 10, touring behind “The National Park,”  its fourth album. (It came out in June in the UK, just now here.)
    It just landed in our quarters and we’re listening and liking now, but we’ll defer to the NME’s Jamie Fullerton, who wrote: “There’s something brilliantly knowing and straightforward about how Maxïmo Park’s comeback album begins with a one-minute piano brush called ‘When I Was Wild’, on which singer Paul Smith sings redemption lyrics about when he lived “in a shadow world” with “repercussions” before emerging as a grown-up. Then it ends, suddenly, and there’s a three-second pause, in which we wonder what the ‘grown up’ Maxïmo Park will have bloomed into … BAM! The accelerator pedal is pressed to the floor, the title track’s snaking fuzz-pop guitar line slips down the spine like an ice cube and we are driven, wind in face, into the most brilliantly ‘Maxïmo Park’ Maxïmo Park album since their 2005 debut ‘A Certain Trigger’. ‘The National Health’, you see, is a fully ticked-off shopping list of everything that’s unashamedly ace about this band … It’s easy to explain how the likes of ‘Write This Down’, ‘The National Health’ and ‘Until The Earth Would Open’ hit hard.

   It’s the faux-Smiths jangles, the blustery organ, the hyper-speed guitar squiggles and, happily, the choruses so big they have their own gravitational pulls. All that on an album with Usain Bolt-worthy pacing that makes the whole thing feel as fresh to the face as a skydive after a wet shave. One of the reasons it works so well is that Maxïmo Park take themselves so seriously, and every song strives for heads-down greatness. ‘The Undercurrents’ is the one moment they achieve it, transcending everything around it (including Smith’s slightly clunky “I won’t forget the way you forgive me” hook).

   It builds, storm-like, into something that might protrude proudly from a catalogue of the Bunnymen, of The Verve, of latter-day Manics, of any Great British Band aware that they are indeed a Great British Band. Maxïmo Park obviously aren’t, but for these brief moments the possibilities are there. It’s the peak.”
  Smith:  “We are quite an electronic band, even though we don’t think of ourselves that way too much,” muses Smith. “It’s emotional, heart on its sleeve music. There aren’t too many songs about the sun or the sky or falling in love in a traditional way. There’s a dark side to it. Depeche Mode were a great pop band with a seedy undercurrent. Our songs have an aggression to them, but there’s something odd about them…”
   The band members took some time apart, solo projects and all, before returning to the Maximo fray. The resulting sounds are darker, more expansive and electronic than before.  Where Maximo Park’s lineage could previously be traced back to the Smiths and Buzzcocks, perhaps now it could include a snatch of My Bloody Valentine or – in places - Violator-era Depeche Mode. Tempos have varied. Palettes have broadened.  Smith considers that  “A Certain Trigger”  was a punky album, “Our Earthly Pleasures”a rock album and “Quicken The Heart” an attempt to bring in elements of groove and dance. And “The National Health?” “We wanted to draw on what we’d learned. It feels like the greatest hits collection we never had. .. It goes from this electro thing to almost industrial.”  Not a word or genre usually applied to Maximo Park.

With Stagnant Pools and Zambrini. Starts at 9, tix $19.

472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, 617-864-3278 www.mideastclub.com