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Sunday, 23 January 2011 |
When White Lies first stepped into the glare of media hype they found themselves simultaneously lauded and maligned. The band appeared in almost every "one to watch in 2009" poll, but almost as much attention focused on their previous incarnation as lightweight indie-poppers, Fear Of Flying.
Were the new image, tortured (and tortuous) lyrics and humourless sixth form angst a cynical marketing ploy? Or, to paraphrase another doom-laden pop star, were White Lies "4 real"?
‘Ritual' arrives two years and a million sales later, proving that their hefty fanbase certainly believed in them. Yet the album raises the same doubts again: for all the moody atmospherics producer Alan Moulder dresses the rudimentary musicianship in, for all the blustering pomp of Harry McVeigh's vocal delivery, the songs rarely convince. It would be tempting to put this failure down to the band's youth - what can such whippersnappers truly know about the hardships of life? - until you remember that they are now the same age as Nick Drake and PJ Harvey were when they first wailed their searing, eloquent confessionals into the world.
The real problem lies in how obvious the band's reference points are, and the gap between their vaulting ambitions and their actual ability to deliver on them. Musically, the synth-heavy swirl of ‘Streetlights' is one of the album's more alluring moments, a game stab at replicating the morose magnificence of ‘Faith'-era Cure, but the dreary central melody and lightweight, embarrassing lyrics ("I'm bored and I'm afraid / I'm falling like rain for you") simply buckle under the weighty production. Similarly, the heavy-handed, flat-footed ‘Holy Ghost' is a transparent attempt to resurrect Ian Curtis, but it's hard to believe he would bother crossing the road for it, let alone cross from the other side.
There are moments where the mini-pops Joy Division approach hits paydirt, notably on the relentless, single-minded surge of the single, ‘Bigger Than Us'. But mostly the trio are at their best when they wriggle free from the colossal shadows they're hiding under. The squirming, grinding electronica of ‘Bad Love' at least plunders from less obvious sources (Curve, Depeche Mode), while ‘Is Love' is an impressively stormy opener, and provides one of the album's few true surprises, when it suddenly shifts pace from groaning industrial slog to breathless electro skip.
They'll need to pull out a lot more surprises like that on their third album if they have any ambition to carve out their own identity. There are enough glimmers of invention on ‘Ritual' to make this seem possible, but not nearly enough to make it seem probable. |
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