Review: “Strangeland” – Keane

When Keane burst forth on to the music scene with Hopes and Fears in 2004, they met with almost instant success.

Their brand of melodic piano-drive pop found a ready audience with people drawn to beautiful emotionally-rich pop. Tom Chaplin’s voice captured anguish and heartache so perfectly you imagined he must have experienced more than his fair share of it and poured it drop by painful drop into what sounded like deeply personal songs of love and loss.

People connected profoundly with songs like “Everybody’s Changing” and “Somewhere Only We Know” and were moved deeply by what I still think is one of the loveliest songs I have ever heard from any band period – the indescribably beautiful B-side “Fly To Me”.

Their next album, Under the Iron Sea, kept the momentum going, and the band sailed on, garnered more fans and etched their tales of life’s emotional high and low points on hearts and minds everywhere.

Then came 2008’s experimental Perfect Symmetry which paid homage to the 80s with such passion that you swore the band snapped their backs in their haste to bow to the decade that gave us Duran Duran and Tears For Fears. Nothing wrong with that – many bands have successfully taken the 80s synth-based sound and woven them into their existing sound and met with great success.

Unfortunately while I applaud experimentation as much as the next musically adventurous listener, Keane essentially junked their original sound, rather than adapting it, to make this transition, alienating quite a few fans in the process. It wasn’t a bad album by any stretch and had a number of songs that wove the spirit of the 80s into their fabric and yet retained a sense of being very much the product of a 21st century band. I found it quite listenable but alas, it wasn’t Keane and nor was the hugely inconsistent follow up EP in 2010, Night Train, which frankly was disappointing and added nothing to Keane’s lustre, such as it was at that point.

One thing that can be said about it was that it was a misguided attempt to have one foot in the sound that so defined their early days and the new experimental sound they were pursuing with admirable artistic vigour, even if the resulting music was less than remarkable.

Thankfully, Keane seem to have largely found their way back from the musical wilderness, all by themselves. Granted Strangeland is not groundbreaking in any respect, and in some ways, merely retreads what they did when they first started, but since when is that crime?

The thing is, it isn’t. But if you believe some music critics, it is a hangable offence. Keane have been accused of sounding “dated and overblown” and having lyrics that read like the pages of self-help manual, which is manifestly unfair. They have simply returned to creating bright shiny emotion-soaked pop with their innate sensibility for crafting hook-laden melodies manifestly intact. Songs like the lead single “Silenced by the Night”, “Starting Line” and “Disconnected” have that unique mix of melancholy and beauty that are the hallmarks of Keane’s sound and are as pure and listenable as anything from their early days.

Deride them if you will for re-inventing the musical wheel but when the wheel is as profoundly musically entrancing and emotionally as deep and rich as this one, you can understand why they came back to what made them so special in the first place.