IdleRich
IdleRich
This is really fucking funny
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jun/14/william-boyd-why-love-keane
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jun/14/william-boyd-why-love-keane
Can't work out if he's deliberately echoing Patrick Bateman but I don't think it is deliberate, I think it's real.I bought Hopes and Fears, the debut album. It wasn't just Chaplin's ethereal, plangent voice that won me over: Hopes and Fears is an unequivocally great album – not a dud track and with a melodic generosity that was astounding in contemporary British rock. Tim Rice-Oxley's fuzzed keyboards may be the default Keane sound but his gift for writing great three-and-a-half-minute rock/pop songs is prodigious. The album came into the charts at No 1 with a bullet – the first of their five consecutive No 1s.
Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far much more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
In '87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip to be Square", a song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself.