code meets music

This album is rather wonderful. I was expecting nothing less, Silent Alarm was my favourite album of 2005, but follow-ups to brilliant debuts have, in the past, dissapointed me.

A lot of people I’ve spoken to about the album don’t think it’s as good as the previous one. I’m not so sure. In Song For Clay (Dissapear Here), the band/producers certainly picked a good opener, beginning with sombre, tranquil vocals over a soft melody, before the warning-siren guitar solo, and the introduction of a drum beat brings the song up to its anthemic peak-sound.

Hunting for Witches, the 2nd track on the album is, for me, the absolute highlight. Beginning with a mix of samples and a videogame-like riff, the song very quickly encourages foot- and finger-tapping. The lyrics of the song carry a pretty straight-forward message regarding the irrationality of parts of the media (and the population) in the aftermath of terrorist incidents, and towards the ‘war on terror’, but the style is far more subtle than a lot of ‘fuck the war’ songs released in the past few years.

I’ve uploaded a copy of the song for you to sample: hunting_for_witches.mp3

Other standout tracks on the album are The Prayer and Uniform; both benefiting from solid backing vocals, but in quiet different ways. The Prayer is powerful from the outset, with a rather unnerving humming joining the initial drumbeat, and being itself joined by Kele’s amazing voice. When I first heard Uniform I wasn’t so sure about it fitting with the rest of the album. The lyrics seemed to lack the subtlety of the other songs with the call-response and duets in the middle of the song being quiet different from the rest of the album, where Kele is most definitely in the spotlight on his own. The more I’ve listened to it this week, the more it’s grown on me, as a way of breaking up the album, and really helping to make the songs that follow it stand out a little more.