The Fray - Helios

Back around the time that the Fray released their third studio album, 2012’s fantastic Scars & Stories, I remember reading a review that lambasted the band’s music and suggested that the Fray might do well to recruit outside songwriters like so many of their mainstream contemporaries had done. I thought that was a terrible idea. Part of the charm of Scars & Stories was that it was a truly collaborative effort. Seven of the 12 songs were written by all four band members, with the other five tracks being penned by the core songwriting team of frontman Isaac Slade and bassist Joe King. Slade and King had also written the bulk of both How to Save a Life – the band’s hit-filled major debut album – and The Fray, their impressive 2009 sophomore effort. Both discs were enjoyable throughout, with four or five stunning highlights elevating them above other mainstream radio fare. However, with the collaborative mentality of Scars & Stories, it seemed as if the Fray had finally found their comfort zone. Suddenly, every song was a highlight, from the subdued piano ballads to the edgier rockers, all the way to the U2-sized arena anthems. I felt proud to include the album on my top 30 of 2012 list because it truly felt like the album where the Fray were ditching their mainstream trappings and embracing truer artistry and song craft.

Unfortunately, that expectation proved false. Not only does Helios, the fourth album from the Fray, fail to live up to the promise of Scars & Stories, but it also seems to willfully unlearn every lesson that was learned on its predecessor. Instead of sticking with the full-band songwriting method, the Fray adopt a heavy and disconcerting reliance on co-writers here. As if the band had read that Scars & Stories review that I so heartily dismissed back in 2012, Helios has 11 songs and all of them have at least one outside collaborator. From Busbee, a hack who does most of his writing for former American Idol contestants, to Reliant K's Matthew Thiessan, who killed his own band's album with gluttonous co-writes last year, Helios reeks of outside interference. Given the nature of the modern pop music industry, the Fray's decision to bring in songwriters for hire may not seem that bizarre. But for a band that has never given a single writing credit to anyone outside of its inner circle, the decision to go full speed in the other direction is jarring and completely illogical. This album just feels like a major step back for the Fray, and it's tough not to blame the co-writing sessions - or the scatterbrained nature of the songs they produced - as the source of the decline.

Part of the problem is a de-emphasis of the piano rock sound that has always been the Fray’s bread and butter. For the first time ever, there’s not a piano ballad here, and while that may be the band’s attempt at subverting expectations, it’s also symbolic of how off center they sound throughout Helios. On Scars, producer Brendan O’Brien was working to help the band adopt a more rock-focused sound (as evidenced by the album’s propulsive lead single, “Heartbeat”). On Helios, O’Brien is is unceremoniously replaced by Killers producer Stuart Price, who seems to think that the solution to breaking the Fray out of their piano rock vein is to layer their songs in synthesizers and other studio gloss. Don’t get me wrong, I love Price as a producer. I think he’s helped the Killers to construct some of their most powerful and sonically splendid songs. But he’s the complete wrong choice for the Fray, his atmospheric pop production making the earnestness of songs like “Our Last Days” and “Break Your Plans” – otherwise solid pop-rock tracks – sound cheesy and overwrought. “I wish I had I had cheated/At least that’s a reason: I’d understand why you’re leaving now,” Slade sings at the top of the latter, surrounded by unnecessary synthetic strings and layers of ambience. The desperation of those lines would make much more sense in a stripped-down piano setting, but Price’s heavy-handed maximalism makes them sound almost laughably stupid.

Price’s pulsing pop production is consistently the biggest problem with Helios, but there’s not much that could salvage some of these songs. Most of the album’s biggest failures come in the mid-section, where Slade betrays good verse writing with a dull and generic chorus (“Closer to Myself”) or turns in one of the most boring, redundant, and derivative pop songs he’s ever written in an effort to match up with Price’s Coldplay-sized orchestrations (“Hurricane”). The rousing guitar breaks and powerful hook of “Keep on Wanting” are slightly better, recalling the momentum and grandeur of "Munich," a Scars & Stories highlight. A more guitar-oriented sound is also found on lead-off single “Love Don’t Die,” a song that received a muted reception when it released to radio last October, but which sounds positively vibrant in this context. The song is easily the catchiest on the album (thank hit maker Ryan Tedder, who co-wrote and produced the track), with a kick-stomp beat, a shout-along back-up vocal hook, some dynamic work from guitarist Dave Welsh, and a charismatic lead vocal from Slade. When I first heard the song last fall, I hoped that Helios wouldn’t follow in its stylistic footsteps. It didn’t, but as it turns out, this record would have gained a lot from adopting the song's no-nonsense pop rock vibe.

As is, there’s an awful lot of nonsense here, most egregiously on “Give It Away,” which is unquestionably the worst song the Fray have ever recorded and one of the worst songs you'll likely hear anywhere this year. Produced like the band is shooting more for the club floor than for the dramatic television codas they have soundtracked in the past, “Give It Away” is the sound of an already mainstream pop band somehow managing to sell out. In the realm of bizarre jump-the-shark moments in recent music history, the song lands similarly to “Put Your Hands Up,” the horrid attempt at a “dance track” from the last Matchbox Twenty album. Sonically, however, “Give It Away” is more like a Maroon 5 wannabe track, sounding as soulless and overproduced as the bulk of M5’s last album, Overexposed. I even had to check the album credits to see if that was Adam Levine singing the song’s chorus. It’s not. I’m not sure if the song would be better or worse if it was.

Luckily, not all of Helios is that bad. Opener “Hold My Hand” begins with an echoing, octave-up piano loop that recalls Mat Kearney’s “Ships in the Night” from a few years back, generally making good use of its titanic production values throughout. Meanwhile, the last three tracks all find varying levels of success in what they try to do. “Wherever This Goes” boasts a refreshingly minimalistic arrangement, relying on little more than stomps, handclaps, and Slade’s voice to drive the proceedings. “Shadow and a Dancer” suffers from overproduction woes similar to “Break You Plans,” but overcomes them with a wistful lyric that recalls a faded summer love. And the excellent “Same As You” might be the album’s best track, with some nice cello plucking on the chorus that allows the song to be grandiose and climactic without succumbing to the same misplaced bombast that plagues most of the record.

However, even on those songs, it feels like the Fray aren’t quite reaching their potential. For as much as people write these guys off for being generic torchbearers of the mainstream rock scene, they actually explored some really interesting thematic territory on Scars & Stories, from the brooding boxing-as-love metaphor of “The Fighter” to the two brothers separated by the Berlin Wall in “1961.” But where the Scars & Stories songs were inspired by world travels and built from band-wide collaboration, the Helios songs return to the same generic well of ideas we’ve all heard a million times before. With O’Brien at the helm, this record might have turned out as a decent if unspectacular follow-up to one of the best “radio rock” records of recent years. With Price involved, it’s easily the worst album the Fray have made so far, a clear crisis of identity and direction for a band that only recently seemed to be coming into their own. That’s a huge disappointment, and even though there are some solid songs here, I’m hopeful that next time around, these guys will kick Price to the curb, ditch the outside songwriters, go back to full-band collaboration, and come up with a record even better than Scars & Stories. If they continue down their current path, though, then I'm not sure how long I'll keep listening.

Luke Leighfield - New Season

Luke Leighfield - New Season
Got Got Need Records, 2012
Three stars

Piano rock has become a bit of a tired genre over the years, so often plagued by repetition and cliché that many listeners have gotten to the point where they write off anything with that label on association alone. I personally have always had a soft-spot for records where the piano takes the lead role, and I have loved or marginally enjoyed almost every band or artist you could name in the genre, from the classics (Billy Joel, Elton John), to the modern mainstream players (The Fray, Augustana), all the way to the relative obscurities (Wakey!Wakey!, Embrace). From the first moments of Luke Leighfield's fourth full length solo record (entitled New Season), the English-born troubadour recalls a slew of the songwriters that have gone before him in the genre. Leighfield is a Do-It-Yourself artist, but you could hardly tell from his latest record, which plays out as a fully orchestrated, exquisitely produced set of songs that ring, echo, swell, and fall at all the right points. And that makes sense, since Leighfield runs his own record label (Got Got Need Records), has a long list of notable friends in the music industry, and is a fantastically accomplished pianist and violinist, having worked as a sessions musician on both instruments.

The piano serves as the backbone for each of the ten cuts on this record, and while the combination between that instrument and the British-accented lilt of Leighfield's voice will instantly earn him endless comparisons to acts like Coldplay and Keane, his overall sound generally lands closer to that of some of today's most prominent American piano rockers. For example, the presence of Ben Folds floats through many of Leighfield's most dynamic vocal snippets, while the influence of Andrew McMahon (Jack's Mannequin, Something Corporate) can be felt in many of the album's soundscapes and arrangements, especially at the album's best moments.

And there are a lot of great moments here, from the slow burn opening of the aptly-titled "Slow Down" (with a piano riff that could have come straight off of a Something Corporate album), to the summerish pop rock of the title track, all the way to the ringing guitar intro of "Patience," which drew me in immediately. Gang vocals burst in the background of "The One Thing," eventually subsiding into a gentle piano tag, while Leighfield's rock 'n' roll aesthetic is evident in the power chords and the incessant build-up of "Live For More," which also collapses into a luminous, echoing piano outro. A series of arpeggiated piano notes open album highlight "Garde Ta Foy," recalling Adele's massively successful flagship single "Someone Like You", and much like that song was, "Garde" is probably the album's most subdued and emotionally striking number. The delicate accompaniment allows Leighfield's voice to really shine here, gliding over the arrangement in a simplistic but moving fashion that results in one of the most gorgeous songs I've heard all year. As the song moves forward, an ambiance of strings and back-up vocals swell around Leighfield, building as drums enter and crescendo, and ultimately exploding into a wall of guitars. It really feels like a closer, but that honor belongs to "Do Not Settle," a commencement speech of a song that proves itself to be both entrancing and inspirational. Next to the massive scope inherent in the climax of "Garde Ta Foy," the build here feels a bit truncated and restrained, like the song (and the album, which loses steam after its opening but regains it in the final quarter) ends just as it is starting to reach greatness.

Leighfield doesn't entirely escape the usual trappings of the piano pop/rock genre on New Season, but he does tend to transcend them. To be sure, there are lyrical clichés here and there, and Leighfield isn't the most original melodist, causing his songs do run together on occasion, but his vocals have a warm and welcoming familiarity about them, and his songs very often build and grow as they move forward (and with subsequent listens). I don't suppose that the record will win many new fans for the piano rock scene, and the naysayers will very likely find that they have the same problems with Leighfield that they do with genre's biggest stars, but for me and for many who find a certain degree of pleasure in this type of music, guilty or otherwise, this record represents a treasure trove of earnest lyrics, well executed arrangements, and light, beautiful melodies. He doesn't have the hooks that McMahon has, or the lyrical brilliance that Folds manifests every so often, and no one will ever be calling him Billy Joel, but Leighfield is a solid songwriter and an even better musician, and New Season deserves to be heard.

Mumford & Sons - Babel

Mumford & Sons - Babel
Island/Glassnote, 2012

3.5 stars

After this year’s American Idol coronation song (“Home,” by the unfortunately named Phillip Phillips) pretty much rewrote Mumford & Sons’ previous hits in a more uplifting fashion, it was clear they were becoming a substantial force in the music world. And why not? Their debut, 2009’s Sigh No More spawned a bunch of hits and sold five million copies. It was also pretty easy to like, a superfluous but well-executed collection of folk-pop tunes that made listeners feel rugged and indie without asking them to venture too far beyond the boundaries of conventional radio rock or singer/songwriter fare. The songs had a pleasant, winterish feel to them that fell somewhere between The Fray and Fleet Foxes, and the bombastic tendencies of the production (provided by Markus Dravs, a guy with a proven reputation of making “big” records like Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs or Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto) gave the songs an arena-bound energy.

So why, then, did so many people absolutely abhor this band? To be fair, they got a lot of hyperbolic love too, transforming somewhere along the line into the next “frat boy” sensation (for the same people who worship Dave Matthews, Jason Mraz, and O.A.R.). I personally could never figure out how the music at hand managed to inspire such passionate feelings in either direction. As far as I was concerned, you could do a lot worse than Mumford & Sons, but you could also do a lot better. They were innocuous, a lesser version of the folk bands they imitated, but they weren’t the villainous, “folk-rock-answer-to-Nickelback” figures that some of their fiercest detractors accused them of being.

All of this holds true for Babel, their highly anticipated sophomore album, which is, for better or worse, pretty much the exact same record as Sigh No More. The words and literary references have been changed around, but on the whole, Babel follows the same form as its predecessor, and numerous songs are almost blatantly written in the same tradition as past ones. The most obvious example is “Broken Crown,” essentially a sped up version of Sigh’s “I Gave You All,” but listeners will hear familiar echoes regularly throughout these 12 tracks. Most of the time though, it follows the mantra of any blockbuster Hollywood sequel: do everything you did the first time, just do it bigger. That motto is immediately prevalent in the album’s introduction, which positions three rousing numbers in a row. “Babel” opens the album in a similar vein to the title track from Sigh No More, only rather than building the song from Appalachian vocal harmonies, the band just races out of the gate. We get the furiously strummed acoustic guitar, the banjo licks, and the strong percussion backdrop to fill things out before Marcus Mumford lends his signature vocals to the mix. He strains on the high notes and whispers at the quieter sections, in the same way we’ve heard him do before. We’ll hear it again, too.

Make no mistake, Babel is the not an evolution. We don’t get any of the experimentation or bloated self-importance that so often characterizes post-breakthrough albums, and while that frees the guys from the danger of a sophomore slump (how can it be a “slump” when it’s the same formula?), it also means that Babelprobably isn’t going to win many new fans. That’s okay though: it was evident from the day they released “I Will Wait” as a single that they were of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” camp. The fact that the song is predictable and derivative of their old style doesn’t really matter. It rolls along with a rollicking country lilt and boasts a truly gorgeous bridge section, building in a manner that makes these guys sound like what U2 would have been if they had started out as a folk act rather than a punk band with arena rock ambitions. The group, consisting of Mumford, Ben Lovett, Winston Marshall, and Ted Dwane (all of them multi-instrumentalists) dominates these arrangements and sounds as crisp and clean as any set of musicians in the mainstream today. Even if the songs they’re playing aren’t terribly complex, it’s hard not to at least passingly enjoy what they do here.

Album highlight “Ghosts That We Knew” is a gorgeous torch song that recalls Sigh No More’s closing track, “After the Storm,” and it’s hard to see why it doesn’t carry the album out here. “But the ghosts that we knew will flicker from view/And we'll live a long life,” sings Mumford in the refrain, a wistful tone accenting his cryptically nostalgic lyrical craft. It’s the kind of song you would expect to hear around campfires on late autumn nights, the sort of gorgeous elegy your uncle pulls out, in a moment of clarity, at the end of a rambunctious night with the family. Perhaps that’s what a lot of people hate about this band: they feel conventional, like your friend’s brother’s folk band that jammed a few nights a week during college and played bars every once in awhile. But that’s also their greatest strength: they sound like they could be your friends, your family. Their songs ring with truth and honesty and simplicity, with lyrics that sometimes don’t make a lick of sense, but which are fun to sing along to anyway. In that sense, the grand production feels a bit out of place, like Dravs’ spotless work doesn’t really fit the character of the band. But they still find the intimacy in songs like “Lovers’ Eyes,” even with a horn section that barrels in four minutes through, or the bare-bones acoustic work of “Reminder,” which plays like an interlude at first, but distinguishes itself on repeat listens. At moments like these, Babel feels like home.

Babel is not a great album, but it doesn’t really need to be. The songs are too similar, and the album loses its way a bit as it goes (though the fantastic “Below My Feet” adds some much needed climactic heft in the penultimate position). But within these songs, there is a band with a palpable love for what they are doing, and even if they missed the boat on widespread musical respect three years ago, I can still appreciate them for that. Frankly, I’m happy there’s someone making this kind of music in the mainstream, and even happier that there seems to be a market for it. Maybe someday, folk music will worm its way back into the public consciousness, but until then, Mumford & Sons are sort of functioning as the champions of an age gone by. That’s not a bad role to play though, and based on my recent experiences with top 40 radio and the deplorable noise that my roommates put on at parties, you really can do a hell of a lot worse.

"Everything is black and white and grey..."

 The Fray - Scars & Stories

Epic Records, 2012

3.5 stars

Seven years ago (shit, that makes me feel old), The Fray burst into the mainstream music scene with How to Save a Life, an album that spawned a slew of popular radio singles and pretty much immediately made them the posters boys for the type of melodic piano pop that served as the soundtrack for shows like Grey's Anatomy. That association was a blessing a curse for the band, as it pretty much immediately skyrocketed them to stardom but also caused a lot of people to write them off early on. I thought How to Save a Life was a solid record, not a great one: I loved all the singles ("Over My Head," "How to Save a Life," "Look After You," "All At Once"), and a few of the album tracks ("Vienna," especially), but overall, it was a record I felt I outgrew quite early, and judging by the fact that the band's album sales have been dropping with each release, I probably wasn't the only one.

Despite this, The Fray have quietly become one of the most dependable bands in mainstream pop-rock, releasing a self-titled record three years ago that not only had one of the best lead-off singles of that year ("You Found Me"), but also a slew of terrific tracks, especially the closer, "Happiness," which has since become a favorite song of mine. With their third (and arguably best) release to date, The Fray make no attempt to reinvent the wheel, but they come up with their best set of songs to date and with an album that feels decidedly more mature and unified, both in sound and theme. The album's biggest triumph comes in the form of "Munich," a sweeping display of power balladry with a immense chorus. The song contains elements of many of their previous songs, but also adopts a wider array of influences (with U2's presence being the most palpable), and producer Brendan O'Brien makes it sound as huge as it should. I never felt like O'Brien was the right fit when he worked with Springsteen, but he may just be the perfect match for The Fray, as he brings a more definitive rock edge in their sound and makes the band sound bigger, better, and more muscular than they ever have on record. Look no further than first single and album opener "Heartbeat," a driving rocker which sports one of the best hooks I've heard all year, or "The Fighter," where the album's increased emphasis on guitars is perhaps the most evident.

"Run For Your Life" is yet another killer single from a band with a history of them, while "The Wind" juxtaposes beautiful verse melodies, distant backing vocals, and a truly gorgeous falsetto release. I've always liked frontman Isaac Slade's voice, but he sounds better than ever on this record and especially on this song, making it one of the absolute best moments of the record. Similarly breathtaking is "I Can Barely Stay," the album's obvious centerpiece ballad and the song most destined to become a soundtrack staple. O'Brien outfits the tune with an army of strings that are massively appealing, but I almost wish he'd just left the it alone, since I'm certain it would function just as well in a stripped down format, just Slade on piano and vocals. That's only a matter of preference though, and the strings give the song an undeniably yearning and epic feel. Guitarist Joe King takes over vocals on "Rainy Zurich," and much like "Ungodly Hour," the song he sang on the previous album, it's a highlight, with a pleasant downpour of pianos and guitar accents forming an evocative background.

In between the ballads and ready-made radio songs, The Fray experiment a bit with more tempo driven, guitar reliant rock songs, and although the results are somewhat mixed and these songs don't end up being the best moments of the album, they do give it a nicely paced flow. How to Save a Life had great singles, but suffered from a drop-off of quality between those and the album tracks, which were basically just less interesting versions of the hits. Luckily, that's not the case here: "Here We Are" wouldn't have been out of place on the last Switchfoot record, while "48 to Go" is almost begging to become a road trip rocker, and "Turn Me On" is good on record, but sounds like it would be absolute dynamite in a live show, with a chorus ready to be shouted by a venue full of fans. Meanwhile "1961" felt relatively unremarkable until I listened to the lyrics, which tell the story of two brothers who find themselves on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall, unable to reach each other. "But it won't be the same again," Slade sings on the song's refrain, his voice breaking into a lilting falsetto in such a heartbreaking manner that the song worked its way into my brain more and more with each listen. The record closes with "Be Still," a lullaby of a piano ballad that is carried forth by a keyboard that delays and echoes through an empty space, joined only by ambient strings, to haunting effect. As it should, the focus stays with Slade's voice until the end, and even though it isn't quite the closer "Happiness" was, it ends the album with a stark sense of finality.

Scars & Stories came together during an extensive period of traveling that the band took prior to re-entering the studio. They wrote over 70 songs for the project, and the record represents the very best of them, songs that only depart slightly from the band's established musical style, but songs that are informed by world issues and experiences. As a result, this material feels distinctly weightier and more mature than previous efforts, and the songs feel more like they are part of a single journey or arc. As the album's throwback artwork implies, The Fray set out not to make a collection of singles, but a full album, and the accomplishment of that goal is rather easily their best record to date. Landing somewhere between the piano pop of Jack's Mannequin and the increasingly classic rock driven sound of Augustana, Scars & Stories is the sound of a band that is growing and improving with each record, and I think someday, they're going to make something that's really great. With this record and the last one under their belts, they're well on their way.