Razorlight - Razorlight

So, here’s Johnny! The dashing Mr Borrell and his dandy cohorts are back with an eponymous second album that leaves their garage rock beginnings behind them and seems to have been explicitly created in a calculating attempt to catapult them from Dalston dives to stadiums in the States - somewhere, one suspects, their illustrious frontman sees as his rightful place. If you’re looking for evidence of a Bono complex, then it’s all here. The amps are turned down and the vocals up, the lyrics all drip in unashamed emotion and the singalong choruses seem to have been designed solely to get hundreds of thousands of fans to join in with, hands aloft, in arenas around the world.

One of the problems that the band instantly faced was that their electrifying
2004 debut, Up All Night, was a hard act to follow. An inebriated celebration of debauched London nightlife, it recounted tales of joyfully scummy parties, illicit trysts and torn-up dance floors. Fizzing with infectious poppy anthems like ‘Golden Touch’, ‘Stumble And Fall’ and ‘Vice’, it struck a chord and made the hairs on the back of many a neck stand up. So, as a solution they quite cleverly decided that rather than trying to recreate their debut, they would move things on by taking a look at the flipside of the story – what happens when the party comes to an end?

This new offering is a real ‘morning after the night before’ album where all of Johnny’s demons, insecurities and hang-ups come tumbling out. Stale musty booze seeps from every chord of the sprightly opener, ‘In The Morning’ (which owes more than a little to Talking Heads’ ‘Road To Nowhere’), while hungover regrets come thick and fast from the insistently catchy ‘Before I Fall To Pieces’. As a result, where there once was passion, now there is now paranoia. And at times this soul-baring display is a little too much to bear.

On the second track, ‘Who Needs Love?’, Johnny gets deep about relationships, but does so in painful rhyming couplets that wouldn’t look out of place in the diary of a fifteen year-old. The same embarrassingly adolescent lyrical pattern continues on ‘America’ and ‘I Can’t Stop This Feeling I’ve Got’.

But once you get over Borrell’s failed attempts at becoming this generation’s Dylan, just settle back and enjoy the music - these are some of the strongest numbers and you’ll find them floating around in your head for days.

It’s the music where this album excels. Lush and accomplished guitars mingle effortlessly with tight drums and subtle bass, all of which goes along way in creating that huge and epic sound that they were so obviously striving for. Influences are as diverse as the soft rock of Springsteen on ‘Who Needs Love?’ to the joyous Motown beats of The Four Tops on ‘Hold On’. ‘Kirby’s House’ is a gorgeous mellow guitar ditty, while ‘Back To The Start’ is a thrilling, thrashing tune that harks back to the garage rock of old.

It’s radio friendly of course, and some might even mutter drivetime - that most dreaded of labels - but it mustn’t be forgotten that a lot of growing-up has gone into this record. The music is great and when it comes to all the deep and meaningfuls and lyrical misses, well, we can all be forgiven a little self-indulgence when we have our first hangover, can’t we? Let’s just hope that when it comes to that difficult third album someone just gives Johnny some Alka Seltzer so that he’s ready to get the party started again.