You’ll be aware of Keane, of course. Three English blokes: vocals, drums, piano. No guitars. Led by a boyish front guy who looks like he needs his mother’s permission to be out late enough to play a gig. That’s the same cherub-faced front guy who caused a shock when he had to do a stint in rehab after it was revealed he had a drink and drugs problem. Nobody saw that coming.
Like Coldplay, Keane are a band with achingly good chord changes and an ear for radio friendly melodies. Just like Coldplay, Keane sell well to people who don’t generally buy a lot of music, which means that as time has gone by and they’ve continued to be successful, they’ve had to put up with their fair share of negative criticism by ‘serious’ music fans.
Anyway, they’re back with a short-ish album of noisier than usual, mostly uptempo tracks that they started working on while on the road in 2008.
Not that they’ve let the length of their new album Night Train get in the way of them fiddling around with the tried-and-tested Keane formula. And we’re talking about some serious messing here, to a point where die-hard fans are bound to be left scratching their heads a bit.
From the start it’s pretty clear that this isn’t your standard Keane offering. To open proceedings they’ve gone with ‘House Lights’, a pompously grand instrumental track that the band like to come on stage to when they play live. Then there’s a bit of rapping, courtesy of Somali-Canadian K’naan who appears on the single ‘Stop For A Minute’ as well as on the track ‘Looking Back’.
Plus there’s a cover of Yellow Plastic Orchestra’s Inshin Denshin which features vocals in Japanese by female MC and singer Tigarah. Possibly the most un-Keane track among a batch of them, this sounds as if the band have stepped into a time machine and landed in the middle of a Toyko disco circa 1983, a time when electro-pop was in full swing.
On ‘Your Love’ frontman Tom takes a backseat and pianist Tim Rice Oxley takes over lead vocal duties. He does a decent enough job, as it happens. Amid the stranger stuff, this one of a couple of conventional Keane songs that could have appeared on just about any of their albums, other than the fact that one posh English lad has been replaced with another. The other traditional Keane track is the closer ‘My Shadow’, which offers a masterclass in what to do if all you’ve got to play with is a piano, a drum kit and the human voice.
Fair play that they’re taking risks: maybe they’re aware of their cosy and safe image and wanted to show they’re more than we give them credit for. What they’ve given us is an album that acts as a decent sampler of what they’re capable of. At times it’s a bit odd, but fortunately Night Train never quite comes off the rails.
Nick Bradshaw
