Tourist

When a band such as Coldplay or Keane enjoys major success, it makes it easy for music hacks to pigeon-hole all bands utilising prominent piano and fragile vocals into the same bracket. This isn’t always just laziness on our part, with acts themselves often seeing a successful formula and thinking: “Well maybe if we tailored our music this way then we too could enjoy global domination”.

I’m not sure that Coldplay’s label mates Athlete were so consciously cynical while recording their second album, but you do suspect they’ve noticed the appetite for such music and gone for it. Their second album Tourist displays a much more ‘mature’ sound than their Mercury-nominated debut Vehicles And Animals.

This might seem an obvious progression, but the fact that their first album earned comparisons to the likes of Flaming Lips and Beta Band for its electronically-influenced indie-pop means Tourist sounds all the more formulaic and predictable. There is little real invention on show here, although ‘Half Light’ and closer ‘I Love’ do indeed bear resemblance to the Lips, albeit without Wayne Coyne’s flamboyant personality.

Opener ‘Chances’ begins with fragile vocals telling us “Take all the chances that you can”, before heading into the big string-laden chorus, in this case more reminiscent of Elbow than Coldplay.

Joel Potts’ vocals are conversational and creaky, his lyrics homespun, (“Like the poster of Berlin on our wall, maybe there’s a chance our walls might fall”). ‘Trading Air’, a pretty love song with swirling keyboards, is one of the better moments here, but it too contains over familiar refrains such as “All I want is you”.

For excitement and edginess you’ve come to the wrong place, but when a lot of that these days means having the correct haircut or right brand of eyeliner, perhaps there is something to be admired in the way Athlete are resolutely unfashionable. That does not forgive the songs being this unremarkable though. It’s all very nice and thoroughly inoffensive, but I’m not sure that’s much of an incentive to run out and buy it.