So we put this record on a couple of months back when it first dropped through the letter box and as ‘I Go Down’, ‘Silence’, ‘Deep Blue Day’ and the like ascended with a certain degree of pompous grandeur from our weathered speakers, we thought that we hadn’t heard anything with quite this measure of puffy chested bombast and silky-lined craftsmanship since McAlmont & Butler stopped pointing encrusted daggers at each other’s backs. Only more morose, obviously. Then McAlmont & Butler returned. So as it turns out we haven’t heard anything of its type for a good fortnight. But hang onto the Britpop point, the tailored-suit end of, for a moment. Think a bit of Suede, think ‘Urban Hymns’ strings, think Gene and if you must Geneva.
It is this end of the revival, wide songwriting, thrown out to a sea of emotional tussle with a vocal buoy, which ‘Breathe’ utters in greatest amounts. This more so than the Coldplay reference points you may have previously heard. Though that does apply to the bare acoustics of ‘Suppose’ (as does ‘Exit Music’ Radiohead on that particular song and to some extent, umm, The Divine Comedy) and the piano-led title track amongst others. But there is thankfully more to the album as a whole than the lightweight of Geneva, there’s more of a landscape, though under less intense weather conditions than, say, mainstream Verve. For much it seems to hit like Martin Rossiter sparing with Bernard Butler on arid tundra.
The debut single ‘Breathe’ still stands up as the most stark and beautiful offering on their platter, treading tensely across a sensitive tightrope in a dark place. But even the hi-fi re-recording here (the original apparently done pretty much in singer Arnar Gudjonsson’s bedroom) doesn’t so much ebb as thwack and thus loses much of its initial innocence. The album can only be a bit of a disappointment after that. But it does aim to be huge, that we will give them. ‘Catch’ and ‘Crazy’ do huge in the same way Haven do huge, ‘Alone In The Sun’ reminds of ‘Head Music’ Suede – so methodical huge rather than sprawling huge – and ‘I Go Down’ and ‘We’ are just the hugest heartbreakers. Occasionally brilliant, always very safe, there’s just not enough there to be a classic, that’s all.