Athlete have gone soft. Sorry, what’s that, you say? Soft, I say. But Athlete were already soft, you say. Ahh, but not so, I say. That was a popular misconception forced upon them by short sighted folk who reacted badly to the fact that they favoured a close shave, looked like they might not be averse to a moisturising lotion and became a fairly regular fixture on Popworld and the like. You were never going to cut yourself on them (so you could argue paper is in fact more dangerous), but they had a gleaming rack of sharp, clever guitar pop songs teeming with regimented melody and jumbo hooks. They were about the best big unfussy crossover act to case the charts since Prefab Sprout, and that is not to be guffawed at.
But for lap two there will be none of the anthemic arms-in-the-air summer sing-alongs of ‘El Salvador’, jaunty strides of ‘Westside’ and melody slam-dunks of ‘You Got The Style’. There won’t even be any of the cute stripped down basics of ‘Dungeness’. No, because they’ve enforced speed limits on their collective pulse and returned with an inexplicably funereal collection of sub-Travis pith. So much so that now paper actually does seem more dangerous. Maybe they thought they were doing a ‘Man Who’, who knows, they haven’t, but this makes the first album look like the last stand of their adrenal glands.
Opening with a grayscale copy of Coldplay’s ‘Trouble’ is telling of the overall impact. Track 2, ‘Half Light’ shifts from a saunter to an amble, a move in the right direction, but comes crashing back down to the coffee table when its flute solo sneaks in the back door. Flute solo! First single ‘Wires’ is the gleaming exception here, twinned with ‘Beautiful’ from the first album, it’s an achingly vivid tale of a premature birth, beautifully written and touchingly delivered. But it can’t carry a whole album. And an occasional vocal flourish, like the unexpected gospel interlude on ‘If I Found Out’, or fuzzy instrumental break (‘Twenty Four Hours’) can’t mask what this record’s really made of. A soft centre we could have stomached, but they’re unpalatable without all the crispy bits.