When even purported purveyors of post-punk melodrama like England’s Razorlight begin to mellow out, you can’t help but wonder how many more jigs are left on what was once a seemingly endless train of hipster chic. While their debut “Up All Night” was an honest paean to the youthful frivolity of drinking and dancing, their second album, the eponymous “Razorlight,” effects a more subdued response. It’s almost as if the party-goers, having finally left the party at an hour too late for bed yet too early for work, can’t find anything to do with their time but mulling over the distraughtly distinctive angst of being 20-somethings too inured to care and too self-aware to not. As such then, the album is a raucous success.
Prior to its release, the band members had attributed the time between the two records to working up ideas and drumming around the ability to create and expound on a new pop sensibility. Packed with springing guitar riffs and clingingly cloy melodies, the album is undeniably an obvious testament to that experimentation. Lead single “In The Morning” is as clean an effort of digestedly clean fun as there has arguably ever been; it plods and plops to an energy all its own. Conversely, second single “America” takes an opposite approach to new pop exordium by employing both hugely simplistic production and sparse exorability to guarantee maximum osmosis. Both songs are adventures fun and fair as well as increasingly monstrous examples of a fledgling band’s courageous extents towards marginalized commerciability. In a very similar fashion, “I Can’t Stop This Feeling I’ve Got,” manages to step over the slight remnants of the Police and Crowded House to become familiar in an altogether new way. That is to say it provides a sensation or touch with two fingers in the past and three fingers pointing forward.
However, while these are examples of when good things go right, there are also examples of fine limitations to the band’s new mission statement. Despite its sweet oohs and aahs and tenderly strident refrain, “Who Needs Love?” never rises above the station of fluff and air. Likewise, “Back To The Start” is pleasant enough, but among a trove of gems, its somewhat rote bouncing seems dulled and routine. In all fairness however, to be of this rote and this routine is not really to be close to anything remotely terrible.
Toeing the line between the massive catchy-osity of commercial appeal and the more subdued underline of artistic achievement is a finicky endeavor for anyone willing to take it on. The pratfalls and obstacles of fastidious melody and unnecessary image-mendacity abound everywhere you look. Razorlight are able to tie all those things together in a method that’s not entirely unlike envisioning all the ingredients to a perfect night out topped off with the perfect outfit. Even if you were to view the album as your last legs after a night of overly indulgent partying, it still works. At the end of the day, all anyone can really ask for from a fledgling 4-piece post-punk rock/pop group is endearingly fun effort. All pop music does not need to be insulting to be good. This record is a fine example of that. |