I didn’t have high hopes for The Bravery’s new album “Stir The Blood”. After bursting onto the scene in 2005 with instant comparisons to The Killers, TV and Radio airplay all over the shop, top 10 singles and an equally top ten’ing debut album “The Bravery”, they all but disappeared with a follow up album (The Sun And The Moon, 2007) that I wasn’t even aware had been released until 2009. Thirty seconds into the first track of “Stir The Blood” it had already annoyed me.
Singer Sam Endicott never had what I thought to be the most powerful of voices, something akin to a Bob Dylan and Damon Albarn lovechild trying to sing his last words as he died at the age of 204. Those first thirty seconds of “Adored” reminded me of why The Bravery probably should not play live, unless it’s in a recording studio, and even then it’s probably still a bad idea. The sound is nothing new (80′s inspired synth, reverb vocals and tinny drums) even by The Bravery’s standards, and his voice is just as weak as on previous offerings. Bass lines and harmonies stolen from The Stone Roses (even lines in “Adored” are similar to lines in “I Wanna Be Adored”) don’t bode well for a band that aren’t even trying to draw those similarities, but they’re sadly there.
“Slow Poison”, the albums’s third track is actually a good tune (and probably the album’s highlight) unfortunately ruined by Endicott’s voice. It’s the kind of song that would work as an Interpol or Editors song, dark, melodic, echoing lyrics with a catchy chorus and a firm beat, but for some reason they choose to fade out the ending instead of just ending it which makes you feel like you’ve missed out on……well, something. “She’s So Bendable” is yanked straight from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s debut album era. The song is so similar to a BRMC song that I thought my media player had decided it couldn’t take anymore of what it was hearing and took it upon itself to put something on that it knew I’d like.
It’s not often that I want to skip songs on an album I haven’t listened to before but “Stir The Blood” can be added to that list. After seven songs of the same drum beat, synth, bass lines, echoing distorted (and weak) lyrics, that desire hightens. Aptly enough, the seventh song “Spectator” almost reads my mind as I scratch my head in wonder at how much longer the album lasts; “His eyes, like two cats, scratching in his head/Begging him for sleep, starving for a bed/But sleep, it never comes/So he ticks the time away/Hour after hour, hear them play their bells go”. Their futuristic and out of this world sound can mean only one thing; that The Terminator himself brought them back from the year 2029 with him where they laid in wait for 20 years, waiting for just the right time to unleash this powerhouse of sound. This is even further corroborated by “I Have Seen The Future”, a cover of the theme tune to the Dr. Who TV series with their own foreboding words added, warning us all of just what 2029 will be like “We are faster, faster than pain/We are a nerve ending without a brain/We have evolved, we have no feeling at all/It is a brave new world”.
The 11 songs that comprise “Stir The Blood” pretty much all follow the same path as the song before it, with the first track following the last. There’s just not much here at all, even with their songs that sound like a bad version of someone else’s (Stone Roses, B.R.M.C, The National). On closer “Sugar Pill” they apparently hired the singing talents of Matt Berninger from The National, it’s just a shame they didn’t hire the rest of the band to do the whole album, then we’d be left with a record that people might want to listen to more than once, provided they can even get through one listen, that is.
3/10
Worth Checking Out: The Killers, White Lies, The Stone Roses
Listen Before You Buy:
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