Keane 2nd Album

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Housedin a bespoke 3CD digipack with printed wallets and a booklet, this product includes the newly remastered album, previously unreleased demos, B sides and rarities, plus brand new sleeve notes from the band and original team.

Pre-order 'Cause and Effect', the new studio album from Keane. Featuring the new single 'The Way I Feel', the standard CD comes in a shrink-wrapped jewel case and includes a 12 page booklet/inlay with a matt finish.

I'll happily admit if I turn out to have been wrong-- and only time will tell-- but Keane sound like they'll be the last in a long line of British bands who've grown tired of miming Radiohead and now simply aim for the much more imitable sound of Coldplay. I say "last" because Keane's debut album, Hopes and Fears, is so miserably and calculatedly maudlin that it almost seems capable of killing the trend started by Travis and passed like a relay baton to Starsailor and, eventually, Snow Patrol. Coldplaya-hatas will loathe Keane; most others will just be insulted. Inexplicably, the band was recently shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.

Keane consists of three well-meaning guys from East Sussex: drummer Richard Hughes, pianist Tim Oxley-Rice, and singer Tom Chaplin. With this limited instrumental setup, Keane ought to sound like either some bizarro-world version of Ben Folds Five or that pick-up band that played your cousin's wedding. Whether those options would be better than what they actually sound like is up for debate.

Oxley-Rice does attempt to salvage the wreck by channeling U2 circa-"New Year's Day". His piano forms the main melodies, and combines with Hughes' drumwork to form a technically competent rhythm section. The almost minimalist approach of these two could potentially have served as the foundation for a mildly compelling-- or at least passable-- album, one closer in spirit to the chilled-out ambience of this album's only not-horrible track, "Untitled 1". The problem is Chaplin, who sings as though he's trying to talk you down from a ledge (and failing), belting out tunes with all the bombastic earnestness of James Walsh and Fran Healy combined, but no sense of subtlety or melody.

Every song on Hopes and Fears soars, as if winging a gossamer wind to scale the heights of heaven and touch the cloudy hand of God. Across the span of 11 tracks, there are maybe 13 triumph-of-the-human-spirit choruses, each trying to out-uplift the previous. "Bend and Break" is particularly egregious: "If only I don't bend and break," Chaplin wails as the chorus swells to bursting, "I'll meet you on the other side/ I'll meet you in the light."

Silly as the lyrics are, they might have more impact if every other song on Hopes and Fears didn't work the same melodramatic, soft-verse/loud-chorus template with the predictability of a bad xFC-metal band (or if Chaplin didn't repeat more or less the same sentiment each time). Writing such dramatic melodies undeniably takes talent, but putting so many of them back to back takes not only a penchant for repetitious banality, but a particularly rampant egotism: Not since All That You Can't Leave Behind has a band tried quite so hard to change your life.

It's strange, then, that Chaplin puts his own life squarely at the center of these songs-- both vocally and lyrically-- rarely affording consideration to anyone else, even his bandmates. There are other people in these songs, but like Hughes and Oxley-Rice, they're only present as a framework for his projectile vocals, and to reflect his morally superior intentions or ideas about friendship, music and love. In addition to nebulous notions of life and love and hazy references to "change" and "the light," Chaplin peppers his songs with vague pronouns-- she, you, and it-- but I predominates. And when he's not condescending ("I don't know you and I don't want you till the moment your eyes open"), he's engaging in a kind of self-centered therapy ("Everybody's changing and I don't feel the same") that wears increasingly thin from the moment Hopes and Fears begins.

That line from "Everybody's Changing" is telling: For all their elitist pomposity, Keane are just bandwagon-jumpers, without an original thought-- or even a trace of charisma-- to save their rep. My hope is that they'll fade unceremoniously into obscurity; my fear is that they'll breed still more Coldplay knockoffs, eventually saturating Stateside department store P.A.s with all their bloodless sobbing. On some level, I'm optimistic that Keane's eighth-wave mimicry could signal the end of this particular brand of copycatting; on another, I know that it simply points to a future in which upstart British bands aim to sound just like Franz Ferdinand instead.

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The band is Keane and this album was called, "Under the Iron Sea". So I use imagery to convey the Sea contained inside an Iron anvil...aka: the Iron Sea. A heart is under this Iron Sea because of a lyric in one of the songs, "I lost my heart, I buried it too deep, Under the Iron Sea"

'Oh, These Days,' the second studio album by Berkshires folk artist Billy Keane, released on Sept. 8, touches on themes of love, spirituality and 'life in general' over a compact seven-song tracklist.

The album, Keane's second studio project, features seven songs and clocks in at just over 35 minutes, leaving plenty of room for some longer tracks to diverge and weave as the vibe dictates. Many of the tracks were recorded in live takes, and feature vivid horn sections reminiscent of the discography of Van Morrison and immaculate backup vocal work added after the fact in Nashville.

A stomper with a forceful backbeat and a rollicking acoustic riff, this track is distinct as an out-and-out romp. The lyrics, which describe the rift that religion can create between a person and their sense of spirituality, are howled at a frenetic pace in tandem with the music.

With a country ambient opening and a delicate steel guitar sting reverberating throughout, the slowest track on the album uses contradiction to tell its love story. Its deliberate and methodical pace stand out among the rest of the tracklist, as does its implementation of keyboards and choral backing to generate probably the most atmospheric song in the mix.

A self-described wanderer, Berkshires-based indie-folk singer-songwriter Billy Keane has cultivated more than his share of lived experiences. Keane gained notoriety touring with The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow prior to his solo project, and is now about to release his second album, Oh, These Days, on September 8, 2023. The album release is followed the next day by a performance at the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington.

I was able to participate in some incredible experiences, like singing with some semi-professional choirs as a kid or being a part of various things through either church or school and then eventually picking up more instruments and continuing to create music in that way.

Precisely. Sometimes I think we feel an urge to say something. And sometimes that urge is to speak about the fresh flowers. But sometimes that urge is to speak about a social issue or event that is just too heavy not to speak about.

You can learn more about Billy Keane at billykeane.com. You can find his music on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. You can also follow him on Instagram and Facebook.

Look, you might just have to give me this one. There are times when life in the city all gets a bit much and your ceiling falls down and you're donating your entire life savings to TFL to get to work and Boys Are Rubbish and you just want a hot chocolate and for someone to tell you 'there there, it's okay' while patting you on the head like one of those ridiculously fluffy Crufts dogs. Yes in this scenario I am the fluffball pup and I am guzzling the cocoa (despite chocolate apparently being death to dogs but WHATEVER IT'S A METAPHOR) while in the background we have The Keane's newest effort Strangeland, trying to be one of those reassuring pet owners.

Keane do what they do, namely Treatises On The World At Large, Set To Anthemics, and, generally speaking, do it rather well. They have also tried so many tacks and still sold a gazillion copies that by this stage they've pretty much earned the right to do whatever they want, and, well, complaining about it is probably a bit pointless. Under The Iron Sea's narrowly-averted attempts at slaughtering each other in song is still, I think, one of the last decade's more underrated albums for Tim Rice-Oxley's most passionate (and occasionally vicious) lyrics. Perfect Symmetry, meanwhile, was pure sparkly mayhem, derailed by going one song too far rather than playing it safe. And that is what makes Strangeland oftentimes frustrating: knowing that actually, Keane are capable of making genuinely interesting pop music, more than many of the contemporaries they get lumped in with, yet here they've taken several steps backwards.

Calming it down does mostly work; the album's tales of growing up in small towns probably would not work quite so well if there was some electronic demon monster all over their boink. With the overarching theme of friends pulling each other out of strife, Rice-Oxley's lyrics are at their most contemplative here, the likes of 'The Starting Line' imploring the protagonist to "ignore the ghosts that make you old before your time".

There is a formula to the standard Keane hit: verse+bridge+chorus+Chaplin soaring vocals+GINORMOUS MIDDLE EIGHT=anthem klaxon. There are no less than six songs in the first seven that match this exact formula, the exception being the verging-on-maudlin 'Watch How You Go', in such a weird place it almost kills the album stone dead before it gets going. Songs like 'Sovereign Light Cafe' are clearly supposed to be the megahits, but there's just nothing here that matches 'Everybody's Changing' for group singalong wallop, although 'Disconnected' arguably comes closest. In attempting to bring back the slow-burn-much-loved song to appeal to the attention-free Twitter crowd, they often end up not quite achieving either. They're still hardly terrible pop songs, but it feels slightly too easy, slightly too much like they're resting on their laurels.

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