THE FUTUREHEADS
News And Tributes
Vagrant
· Extra! Extra! The Futureheads get serious and make mediocre second album!
News and Tributes kicks off with a sparse, pulsating drum beat, the opening riff of "Yes/No." As this sound eventually grows in volume, a buzzing guitar is layered overtop and soon those strongly accented vocals that we remember so well fall into place. As anyone with a set of smarts should know, the opening cut on a band's sophomore album is the most important track of their career. Fortunately, this one is a real firecracker.
However, just four songs later, it becomes blindingly obvious that a few things have changed for the worse since The Futureheads’ near-flawless self-titled debut. The band’s biggest strength, its four-part vocal harmonies, is still pushed to the forefront – this album’s three best songs are tracks one, two and four. Yet once you reach the fifth cut, the wool is pulled from your eyes and the album’s overriding theme is revealed. The majority of these songs have been slowed down from a sprint to a jog, and glossed over with an implausible seriousness that is hard to take seriously.
There are definitely some tracks that will get stuck in your head (especially "Skip to the End"), but nothing as giddily exciting as "Decent Days and Nights," "A To B," "Man Ray" or the beloved Kate Bush cover "Hounds of Love." Stripped of their peppy punk hooks, angular guitars and simple, catchy choruses, The Futureheads seem lost in a sea of mediocrity, playing a brand of moody mid-tempo Brit-pop devoid of any sort of fun. They’re just not a band suited to slow, serious songs, and as painful as it is to type, dirges like "Burnt," "Thursday" and the title track are just plain bad.
Like Green Day on American Idiot (oh snap, he went there!), this is a band growing tired of their tried, tested and true sound, spreading themselves far too thinly across a variety of more "mature" musical styles and, to put it bluntly, sucking. Pity it had to happen so early in their careers, as that 2004 debut was bursting with single-ready, electrifying tracks – if The Futureheads had just stayed on the same path, they could have continued to strike gold at every turn.
They should be commended for taking a risk and trying something new, but while the debut still inspires singalongs, finger points and fist pumps, News and Tributes needed a bit more editing.
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