Keane, Strangeland
*** POP
Like all good sugar rushes, this charming British quartet's fourth studio album deftly hooks you at the start before it slowly numbs your senses.
Singer Tom Chaplin has one of those near-perfect pop voices that could live forever on the radio, and chief songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley has given him some sturdy and pretty, keyboard-driven relationship songs to work with.
The overall sound is lush, a bit glossy and seamless, and the simple messages of love's ups and downs, and of longing and regret, are succinctly delivered in singalong four-minute bites.
Opening track You Are Young and first single Silenced by the Night are particularly hook-laden and show a Brian Wilson influence, and the lyrics to Watch How You Go typify the album's winsome approach to love: "Be gracious with your light and may the years be kind now…the things that we have shared will soon be left behind now.'' But every enduring romance — and pop album — needs a bite and an edge, and both are missing as the work progresses. One dark epic ballad, a sprinkling of killer lyric couplets, and more thematic variation would have fortified Strangeland and helped fulfill the promise of the title.
>>Download: The above, plus Sovereign Light Café, The Starting Line
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