(Polydor/Universal)

A return to roots for The Music after four years in the drug mines

The Music have gone back to the dance-influenced, more electronic sound of their first album while leaving all of the stadium-rock exuberance and triumphalism of their second. Crash bang wallop with fast beats and fancy guitar work. Singer Robert Harvey veers between open-hearted cliches for the arena like “How can I fly if you won’t give me wings” and repeating lines like he’s The Living Sample, such as the title track’s “Strength in numbers / No one can come between us.” As always with The Music it’s the emotion packed into the delivery more than what he’s saying that matters. Harvey sounds less like Robert Plant now and is finding his own voice, spending a lot of the album singing about the drug hell that chewed up that big four-year gap between albums, especially in songs like The Spike and Drugs. He’s at his best when he takes his personal experiences and crafts them into an anthem like No Weapon Sharper Than Will, which is one of the best songs they’ve ever recorded. If the album were all of that quality there would be a lot of happy Music fans around, but unfortunately it does dip and blur together in the middle. The closer, Inconceivable Odds, is another standout though, a gentle acoustic number in sharp contrast to the rousing chorus-chants and guitars to dance to of the rest of the album, and it works perfectly as a four-and-a-half minute chillout room to finish with.

***½  

JODY MACGREGOR

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