Keane - Perfect Symmetry (2008)

Tracklist:
1. Spiralling
2. The Lovers are Losing
3. Better than This
4. You Haven't Told Me Anything
5. Perfect Symmetry
6. You Don't See Me
7. Again and Again
8. Playing Along
9. Pretend That You're Alone
10. Black Burning Heart
11. Love is the End


The Perfect Symmetry – 8/10

As soon as I heard that piano rock band Keane added guitars for the first time ever, this album could not escape my attention. For the first time in my life I was listening to a Keane album, and I was quite pleasantly surprised. The lads from Great Britain make strong piano-driven pop music with catchy vocals, yet they are not your everyday band. Keane has, like Coldplay, that one thing that makes them different from your average pop band: a unique sound. The band is unique in almost every way. The fact that they are very piano-based is one, but Tom Chaplin’s vocals are really one-of-a-kind. He sings with a clear, present voice, has a great vocal range and often uses cool metrics in his lyrics like on “The Lovers Are Losing”. He can be a bit annoying when he sings gently though. Combine that with Tim Rice-Oxley’s unique piano arrangements and Richard Hughes’ energetic drums and you’ve got a cool trio with a unique sound. What did the addition of guitars result in?

Keane is quite a synthesizer-based band and the addition of guitars did not change that very attribute. Where some might have expected a major change in sound, it’s not really showing here. The guitars mostly are clean and just play the chords like on opening track “Spiralling”. There are certainly songs where they are a bit more audible and more adding to the song like “Pretend That You’re Alone” and eventually we have one song with a sole guitar on a light distortion carrying the main theme in “You Haven’t Told Me Anything”. As said earlier, the main instruments are still the piano and the synths. I don’t believe that this is a shortcoming at all, for this is the proper way to accompany Tom Chaplin’s vocals in these happy songs with their great melodies. For I think that is the strength of Keane and Perfect Symmetry: vocal melodies and their lyrics. Chaplin’s lyrics often consist of very catchy and memorable phrases with great metaphors within them and they’re sung on this melody that just fits the music behind it like a piece fits in the puzzle. Often he finds the words that not only fit the metric of the verse or chorus but also sound very catchy. A more guitar oriented accompaniment wouldn’t do enough justice to this unique way of singing.

Having described the overall music, let me get a bit into the details and the highlights. The highlight of this album is hard to point at. From the very first track to the very last one the album is solid and hardly gets weaker. There’s energy throughout, mostly due to the drums of Mr. Hughes. The album begins with the jungle sounds of “Spiralling”, just before it explodes into a bombastic pop song with a slightly upbeat theme. The synths rise high above all other instruments and when Chaplin arrives in the verses the piano takes over from the synths and all the attention is drawn to the great vocal melodies and metrics. The second track “The Lovers are Losing” is my absolute favorite. While it also begins with a heavy synth-overload, this one really shines in the chorus. The verses, accompanied with a soft guitar plucking at the background, feature already catchy lyrics, but when the chorus begins Chaplin has his finest hour with these great metrics and the lyrics fitting so well within them. “Better than This” continues in the same vein and features some energetic drums and some clapping on the beats. Again we have the guitar playing clean chords without changing the Keane-sound too much. The chorus is just more of the great melodies. We have a more guitar oriented theme on “You Haven’t Told Me Anything”, which adds a little variation to the album. The tone is also a bit less cheerful here but nonetheless gives Chaplin enough space for some more great metrics. The title track features the recognizable Keane piano theme, but also sounds a bit more sad and emotional than the first few songs, which creates a more epic chorus, where Chaplin really adds lots of emotion.

We have our first ballad in the shape of “You Don’t See Me”. This also features the trademark use of pianos and the clear vocals. A real highlight here is the bridge where Chaplin sings high and thus adding a lot more to the song. Where “Again and Again” is a more cheerful song in the vein of the first few tracks, an attempt at an epic is being found in “Playing Along”. This one is quite gentle in sound and starts off with a Coldplay-ish theme, which is being Keanified as soon as Chaplin starts to sing. This track pretends to be just a ballad when you hear the relaxing chorus and verses until you get to the ‘turn up the volume’-part. At first it replaces a chorus and remains quite unnoticed, but later it comes back with much more powerful arrangements, featuring our dearest Richard Hughes who is having a good time slamming the drums. “Pretend That You’re Alone” and “Black Burning Heart” are two happy pop songs with the great metrics and lyrics as we know from the first few tracks. Last and least of the album comes “Love Is the End”, which is quite a nice ballad in itself, but is the only song on the album where Chaplin sounds very tedious and annoying. I must add, it doesn’t always annoy me.

All in all, I must conclude Perfect Symmetry to be a great album. There’s a very cheerful atmosphere all over the album, with a few exceptions here and there, and there are great lyrics with great metrics. If you are a bit sad, just listen to this release by Keane and you’ll be cheery again. I would like to recommend this to fans of the pop genre, though I wouldn’t recommend listening to this if you got a headache.

Strongest tracks: “The Lovers are Losing”, “Perfect Symmetry”, “Again and Again” and “Pretend That You’re Alone”.