Keane
Under The Iron Sea
Island/Reprise/Universal

Keane are an English three-piece, consisting of a vocalist, a drummer and a keyboardist/bassist who produces a wall of synthesized sound that is big, anthemic, and aimed fairly and squarely at the arena. They're huge in Europe; their debut album won the Brit Award for best album in 2005 and has sold over five million copies. How do they do it? Well, Keane in fact have a special machine that processes influences. They start by entering in their U2 data, run it through the Coldplay filter, and then in case there's anything meaningful left, flatten it out with their Doves stadiometer. Consequently, there's lots of big gestures, most of them concerning relationships and self-discovery.

Ordinarily they'd be just another harmless pop band that writes pleasing, inoffensive songs that people like to sing and sway along to at music festivals. However, Keane are also terribly self-important, and that's unfortunate, because they've got nothing terribly important to say, both musically (see special machine that processes influences, above) and lyrically (lyrical excerpts: "Why do you lie/when you want to die?"; "It's just another day/nothing in my way/I don't want to go/I don't want to stay". Presumably, there is also a moon in June?

Keane say they wrote this album because "We needed a record that was going to make us feel alive again...In the songs we created a kind of sinister fairytale-world-gone-wrong, a feeling of confusion and numbness represented by a dark place under an impenetrable iron sea." Well, it's worked. 'Under The Iron Sea' gives me a headache and a fervent desire never to have this sort of bland bullshit inflicted on me again. Pretty melodies, unoriginal statements: Keane are really just the stadium-oriented equivalent of any Top 40 starlet shaking her ass on your Saturday morning TV. At least the latter don't pretend to be anything but.

Peter Strelan