Listening to 2010

The first in a series...

The Delays: "Star Tiger Star Ariel"

It's been a long time since Coldplay's "Parachutes" (2000) and "A Rush of Blood to the Head" (2002). I've grown mean and cynical and I’m officially a Coldplay-hater, which places me in the indie snob club, I guess. But it’s not really a reaction to their arena popularity or the Gwyneth Paltrow-Chris Martin alliance of perfected privilege. OK, that might be part of the problem. But mostly it’s the spineless minivan music. And I've got a Honda Odyssey in the driveway. It's for transporting kids not named Apple to school and soccer games. We're all good.

Now I still like me some piano-based “sensitive” singer stuff where the soaring choruses can be spotted a mile away. There’s Travis, but they aren’t goofy and happy with the way things are. I also like the even more sugary Keane, and they managed to team with Somalian rapper Ka’an to create the addictive “Stop For A Minute” last year. Coldplay will do it soon, too, you watch, but they’ll go with Kanye … because he’s hot hot hot.

Which brings me to the Delays. They knocked me out with this album, and while it contains plenty of soaring choruses, I haven’t seen it mentioned on one year-end list. I couldn’t stop listening for weeks, from beginning to end, and that just doesn’t happen much these MP3 days. Maybe it didn’t catch on for the negative associations with this type of music, but underneath the polished sensibilities are wicked subversions, lyrically and musically.

OK, dude’s voice isn’t for everyone because, frankly, it doesn’t sound like a dude sometimes. But I dig it as a sort of reaction to all the dudes who don’t bother to sing these days. This guy can sing. And when he goes from falsetto to sort of angry Geddy Lee, the energy works. Is this revved up prog-rock, or maybe the ghost of operatic Queen, which was never my thing? No, not really, but it surprises me how the Delays and another favorite Bloc Party (see 2009’s “Weekend in the City”) have referenced some of that approach in a way I find more aggressive than fey, and very relevant.

These songs build and weave. That’s enough, but then there’s some rather cryptic lyrics dealing with things like an obscure nature mystic (Find A Home), or the widow of a WW II pilot (May 45), or, hell — I’m not sure what the title track is about (a spaceship?), but it revs its engines at the end and leaves the earth to conclude an album that starts with a whisper and then doesn’t ever stall.

This is how I feel when hearing this album. But I know it doesn’t have a chance with some listeners. It’s a highly produced offering that may provoke immediate bristling. That’s fine. But don’t consign it to the Coldplay formula. It contains multitudes, and I’m still digging through them.

Check out: “Unsung”

Just breathe; we'll make a picture not a scene,
'Cos you don't have to preach to me,
There's not a note you cannot sing,

Unsung, you'll be a ghost before too long,
You'll get your moment in the sun,
Under the moon, under the gun

There's a hole carved in me you can see straight through,
Fill it in, fill it in, 'cos it's shaped like you,
There's a hole carved in me you can see straight through,
Fill it in, fill it in, 'cos it's shaped like you...