The Fray: The Fray
The Fray release their self-titled second album
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Sunday, 08, Feb 2009 10:01
Epic, out February 9th.
In a nutshell...
Middle. Of. The. Road.
What's it all about?
Preceded by the single You Found Me, this second full-length offering from the Fray is relatively short as albums go. It offers just ten songs and lasts about 45 minutes. Unfortunately, that's about 45 minutes too long.
Who's it by?
The Fray are a piano-based rock band from Denver who combine the worst bits of Keane and Starsailor with a supersized side-order of over-egged emotion. A four piece, the band sacked the only member who sounded vaguely exciting (ex-bassist Caleb Slade) before they got big. Then wrote a song about it featuring lines like "Without a sound/we lose sight of the ground/In the throw around".
This, along with an equally bland song that was picked as the soundtrack to an advert for Grey's Anatomy, helped their first album to go double platinum in the US. It also shifted a shedload of copies in the over here.
Pianist/singer Isaac Slade, guitarists Joe King and Dave Welsh and drummer Ben Wysocki have now completed a second set of songs that sound much the same. The lead single off the album, You Found Me, repeated the trick of being picked to advertise a popular TV series. This time it was the mystery drama Lost which propelled it to the upper reaches of the US charts. The generous spirit in me would like to believe the song wasn't written with the TV series deliberately in mind...
As an example.
"Baby close your eyes/Don't open til the morning light/Baby don't forget/You haven't lost it all yet."
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
The singles off their first album earned them two Grammy nominations, so there's a depressingly realistic chance this album might actually win them one. Even if it doesn't, it's likely to sell a vast number of copies. Mostly to teenage bloggers who use words like "heartfelt" and think it's deep. But probably also to those middle-aged housewives who reckon listening to Coldplay makes them look "hip".
What the others say
"And now, because there are ABC dramas badly in need of soundtracks, the Fray returns with The Fray[.] The would-be hit, You Found Me, slaps one of the band's interchangeable choruses onto some vanilla hokum about 'the corner of first and Amistad/Where the West was all but won', which I imagine is intended to be profound." - Troy Reimink, Grand Rapids Press
"After hearing You Found Me on the radio non-stop for the last few months, it was time to see if the rest of the album was as good as the lead track. I wasn't disappointed either. [It is] a lovely flawless follow-up to How To Save A Life." - Ruth Harrison, Female First
So is it any good?
It's hard to know how to begin with this record really. It sounds to me like the band didn't really know how to begin either. Most of the tracks on The Fray sound so similar that there is no obvious opener. So perhaps they just picked one out at random, pulling names out of a hat in the same way they did to decide their band's name. However they chose it, Syndicate was a bad choice. Not that any of the others would really have been any better. Because there is a fundamental problem with this record, in that none of the songs are actually any good.
I've come across hundreds of albums where there are two or three decent tracks and the rest is just filler, but this is the first one I've ever found where I didn't like a single track. It's not that they're awful, or horribly grating to listen to. In fact, the production is light and unaffected and the band play their instruments well, it's just that the songs are uniformly bland and uninteresting.
Pop music does not always have to be ground-breakingly original. It can be excellent while sticking to a tried and tested formula - like say Keane-esque soft rock. Pop doesn't have to experiment with new textures and sounds, unusual chord sequences or interesting instrumentation - which is just as well, because this album does none of that. But there is one element that is essential to pop - it must have a catchy tune. This album has none.
Beginning with the low that is Syndicate, the album gets worse at it goes on with each melody sounding (somehow) even less remarkable or memorable than the last. Even single You Found Me fails to stick in the head for long before it is pushed out by the next abysmally boring offering.
Towards the end I thought I'd seen some light at the end of the tunnel. The riff at the beginning of the penultimate track might possibly pass as rocky. If you came across it at a Girls Aloud school disco night. After making yourself sick on too many sugary sweet alchopop songs perhaps. But alas soon even this flickering glimmer of hope was soon cruelly snuffed out as Slade launched into another identical wailing chorus about holding his breath...
1 /10
Tristan Kennedy