Rather than kickstart some rambling and disparaging assessment of the Coldplay-stroke-Snow Patrol-stroke-Stadium Rock conundrum that follows Athlete around like some deeply unpleasant odour, let’s start by saying that Black Swan’s rousing and gently chipper collection of sweeping, grandiose, widescreen space tunes must rank as one of the most honest and unpretentious releases of the year. Not for Athlete the gallant baroque of the Shadow Puppet’s ‘Age of Understatement’ or the belligerent dysphasia of the Lip’s ‘Embryonic’ – just chiming and really rather lovely tunes as sparkling and uncomplicated as ‘Superhuman Touch’ (with the bubbling digital sequences of a young Grandaddy faithfully intact) and songs as fragile and earnest as ‘Don’t Hold Your Breath’.
Fans of producer Tom Rothrock and Elbow will be pleased that the same mellow depth that characterised ‘Leaders of the Free World’ has been repeated by Rothrock here, the band stripping away the glittering stomp and pomp to its bare bones for skeletal folk elegies like ‘Love Come Rescue’ and ‘Rubik’s Cube’, vaguely reminiscent of Northern mavericks like Liam Frost and Iain Archer. It’s not artists like Athlete that make ‘pleasant’ sound like a bad thing – it’s people like James Blunt.
If music be the food of very emotional sensitive sorts with large studio budgets – play on.