The Irish Maroon 5 - only with soul-baring passion instead of well, sex - take no chances on their fourth album. The epic, sky-scraping bombast is cranked up as front man Danny O’Donoghue lets fly his designer angst on another set of songs about non-specific heartache and the power of positive thinking.
It’s certainly a winning formula of market-ready blandness and The Script do deliver a convincing start on No Sound Without Silence. The opening salvo of No Good in Goodbye, Superheroes and Man on a Wire are all fine examples of widescreen modern stadium rock with solid hooks and a real propulsive upper momentum.
But the velocity soon falters as The Script try to turf Kodaline out of the emotional fallout shelter. Flares, which has been polished to a high sheen by the dead hand of the one they call Tedder, is the requisite lighter aloft moment and from there in, The Script stick mostly to the script - swirling synth atmospherics, breast-beating import, and cathartic Coldplay-doing-U2-doing-Coldplay guitars.
The cringe moments come half way through with a couple of songs that may suit Cecilia Ahern if she runs short of music for her latest shamrock-eyed TV series for German TV. Paint The Town Green, a rallying cry for the Diaspora who are missing the ould sod, is just blunt plastic paddyism (OK, it’s a different era but Thousands are Sailing it is not), while Hail Rain or Sunshine ladles on the fiddles and should make a nice ad for Galtee one day.
Never Seen Anything `Quite Like You' uses the word “prom” (debs is clearly a tough one for a good rhyming scheme) and will sound even prettier when it turns up on a One Direction album. But you’ve got to admire The Script’s sheer self-belief on Without These Songs - a roll call of greats including Sinatra, Nirvana and Johnny Cash, which is either a nice homage to true talent or a cheap way to show up The Script's own shortcomings.
No worries - in the same way that U2 cracked America by quoting the Bible, The Script might just do the same by sounding like they’re reading from an Oprah-endorsed self-book manual.
Alan Corr
