The album opens with ‘glorious’. And a glorious sound it is. A huge space filled with a single guitar playing a solemn part, with the promise of an elating climax. The space is reminiscent of Coldplay at their more minimal, and most powerful dynamic. Paul Hampton’s voice joins in, bringing with it a sense of restrained optimism as the song builds. Then just as the song needs a change it holds for a second… and the release satisfies the ear; the drums come in strong and carry you further along through builds and dips in well-timed steps that keep your attention, if your not simply taken along without realising; until a reprise of the intro and end. And it is only at 4 minutes 42 seconds that you realise that you got here without the payoff you were expecting, that the build up peaked a couple of minutes ago, short of the souring heights promised. You were shown a photo of a mountain and in your head thought that you would be taken all the way up, shown a breathtaking view, only to be carried off the precipice and delivered safely back to earth. Only too soon do you realise that you were only getting the photo.
This album shows more potential than it delivers. Now that feels a bit of a cop out on my part to say. But to illustrate my point, and bear with me a moment; on the CD track listing is an asterisk, and an asterisk is fun, right? Being an album it’s hardly going to be a clause like ‘*subject to terms and conditions’ or ‘*may contain strobe lighting’, but this one reads, “*bonus track electrons & particles”. Now a bonus track is especially fun, only I like to discover them. My problem is that by telling me there is going to be a bonus track they have stolen the magic of discovering it. And that is what this album is. No surprises. Nothing to discover.
There are some strong potential singles in here that could do really well. So long as there are no indie-pop bands on the horizon that are going to re-imagine what is the current climate of indie-pop. Computerclub are not reinventing anything, though they
do do it well.
Overall I like this record. Throughout the drums remain consistently interesting and appropriate, imaginative and played with a good feel on each song. The guitar parts, however standard, are played well with only a few strange choices of harmony that detract from some otherwise nicer sections. There are some great sounds in the details of the production around the main body of each song. But for me the vocals stand out and I don’t like them. The opening track and one or two others show Hampton to be a passionate singer but for the most part I fail to be convinced that he is being himself. There is too much of the Editor’s Tom Smith for me to feel that Hampton is being honest to his own music. There are phrases that have the kind of odd enunciation that seems to try and make a hook out of a vocal part that doesn’t have a hook. In the chorus for ‘this is on fire’ Hampton pronounces “fire” as if he’s going to rhyme it with “liar”, only to rhyme it with “life”, which is distorted so that it is forced to rhyme with “fy-are”. It only serves to distract me from what I later thought was a good chorus. This, and some other strange choices of vocal embellishment have left me frustrated because Hampton has a good voice but you rarely get to hear him singing in his own voice. That said, I it should go down quite well as a quirky yet familiar style of singing with many fans of this blend of indie-pop.
Tracks like ‘some kind of love’, ‘beat connection’ and ‘turn the lights out’ save the album, but for every great track there are two that fail to stand up. There are 13 tracks on the album (that is including the bonus track that we are so graciously informed about), but it seems to me that there is a great 10-track album here that has been stretched into a 13-track, not so great album.
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Veara – The Walls Have Ears
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Computerclub - Before the Walls Came Down
