An album of revelation both musically and personally. That’s what it says on the tin, but as we all know from the packers at Netto, when you buy a tin of beans, beans are not always what you get. That architects of new musical success, the NME tip the album to knock Coldplay from their carefully crafted pedestal is even more remarkable. Far from being the unscheduled flight into fresh territories, ‘Silence Is Easy’ is pretty much more of the same. And if ‘more of the same’ in this context meant more in the way of shiny melodic brilliance, then this inevitable duplication would obviously be more than a little palatable. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
With the exception of the marvellously thumping Phil Spector produced title track, ‘Silence Is Easy’ and the delicate yet momentous, ‘White Dove’ and ‘Born Again’, the album shows the Chorley Four approaching maturity with much the same sluggish compliance that a pensioner approaches Parkinson’s Disease; a condition in which wretchedness and weariness is worn like a badge of honour.
It’s not without its life-affirming moments, however. The frantic beating pulse of album opener, ‘Music Was Saved’ is as delightful as it is unpredictable and the disco-inferno that is ‘Four To The Floor’ – whilst a little spurious and ingenuine – is a likeable enough alternative to the increasingly tired Tim and Jeff Buckley-isms.
Confessional, confrontational and swathed in the sticky bandages of healing, it’s an album that simply implores to be understood: Who am I? What is my place in the world? Who the hell are you to tell me otherwise? James Walsh pleads like the man that no one is listening to, to stop listening, like the man no one notices to stop looking at him. At best, it’s a fanfare for the malcontent, at worst, the arrogant posturing of a self-styled outsider. And though touching at times, its tears are traded all too cheerfully.
If Spector has chosen to re-work the score to the remainder of the tracks on this album, the result could have been something special. As it is, it’s really no worse than Coldplay. But not sufficiently better…