We want to like Morning Runner, really we do. If you have any kind of instinctive yearning for maudlin chest-beating gravel-dashed power-pop, the sort with lungs like massive steam-driven bellows you could probably spot from space on a cloudless night, you will too. Their first couple of singles didn’t hang about, like a grand piano coming in for a bear-hug as the world blinked by in the background. Reassuring, warm, familiar, but not without the feeling that things could hit the boil (or a minor key at least poke you in the eye) at any moment. You wouldn’t exactly call it a hint of danger, but there was definitely the feeling that something looming lurked out of sight. And they had the scent of an era when well-fed, hearty pop music was king. We’re talking Tears For Fears, Deacon Blue, Simple Minds, U2 and especially The Waterboys. Guilty pleasures all round? Only take a few steps back and things don’t seem entirely as beguiling or predestined.
It would be unfair to use external factors alone to judge this record, but their presence – or rather colour-sapping lack thereof – in interviews and publicity shots rings rigidly true here too. As it would; there’s no artistic trove of emotional treasure stashed behind the stunted façade. There is some capable, chunky song-writing augmented by impressively chiming production, but evidence of anything not assembled or at least re-shaped in the studio is hard to piece together. Though while their obvious lack of impulse detracts from initial impressions, their studious mastering of the narrow channel they traverse does bring them success. Take the massive hammering concert-hall piano-work on ‘Work’, sounding crushing in spite being so meticulously arranged. It is not however, as has been claimed elsewhere, at all akin to the natural supremacy of Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds. We’re much closer in fact to talking Embrace, Starsailor and of course Keane. Not quite the same.
The boy has a great voice, making squirming discomfort sound rather cinematic. But do we believe it? Has it been born from anything? Sometimes it seems more like an accountant’s voice turned good under make-up and lights, doing a weepy Michael Hutchence on Stars In Their Eyes. And like the album more generally it steps on its marks, but any further reasoning is absent. ‘Have A Good Time’ for instance is, with its Manic Street Preachers guitars, the album’s intended teeth-rattler, but it doesn’t seem to know why and comes across as ultimately two-dimensional. ‘Gone Up In Flames’ however is a proper pop song with touch-paper lit, as is ‘Burning Benches’ when it gets going, sounding like Keane turned upside down having the change shaken out of their pockets. So an enjoyable if not particularly impressive feat. It is a great record, it is a confidently finished debut, but it doesn’t seem definitive as it might have done, it doesn’t make the most of its position. It merely offers a contribution.