- Artist
- The Fray
- Label
- RCA
- Release date
- 26th February 2007
- Genre
- Rock
Nature hates a vacuum nearly as much as the music industry, particularly when there's money to be made. So in the absence of any Keane or Snow Patrol action in the UK during early 2007, Sony are stuffing the gaping conservative-indie hole with some equally tedious US counterparts.
A cloying, piano-led four-piece from Denver, The Fray released this album in their homeland back in September 2005. Since then, it's done 2 million in sales and seen various examples of its tiresome whinges employed as the musical backdrop to moments of supposedly profound emotion during American dramas - the usual emo-rock loving suspects: The OC, Grey's Anatomy, One Tree Hill etc.
This should give you an idea of what to expect on each track. A plaintive piano lament begins the song, drums go kaboom, guitars go bar chord crazy and Isaac Slade attempts a rock rasp to legitimise the daytime-TV blandness of his platitude-stuffed lyrics: "You made up your mind to leave it all behind, now you're forced to fight it out" he bleats on Fall Away about Christ knows what. The same thing essentially happens 12 times throughout How To Save A Life when hit single Over My Head (Cable Car) would really have sufficed as a one track album.
One can only hope that the British audience will reject this empty emotive masturbation - as much out of sheer over-familiarity as anything. But with Snow Patrol's Eyes Open still in the top three for something like the 147th week, the climate appears perfect for The Fray to plug that Keane-less gap. All we can do is plug our ears.
