Can we get some coffee in here please? Athlete’s perky Mercury-nominated "Vehicles And Animals", with its relentless jalopy rhythms and geezer stance, may have been annoying to many but it at least had an in-yer-face charm about it. It twiched with vigour. Two years on, however, and this starchy, parchment-dry follow-up sounds like a late bid by the London four-piece to ditch any past innovation and crash the Keane/Snow Patrol party with some of their own Tony Parsons-style male sensitivity set to piano and chugging boy rock.
And so sparse, feel-my-vulnerability piano-led verses lead inexorably onto big, bosom-heaving choruses drenched in enough tightly-wound strings to cause Simon Rattle himself to blench. The tone is never less than deadly earnest and lyrics stray little further than “the taste of your kiss still on my lips” and “all I want is you” territory. Still, at least they’ve been listening to some good stuff: The Flaming Lips’ "Soft Bulletin" by the sound of it, given the mentioned mathematicians and machines, and far-out-man organ arpeggios.
Unfortunately "Tourist" is derivative in only a one-dimensional sense: its imagination stopping where Wayne Coyne’s begins. Joel Pott’s cutesy, glottal-stop-clogged vocal style can also be irritatingly distracting, its constant upward cadence suggesting someone skateboarding up a ramp to the note required.
Typical are "Chances", an anthemic exhortation to “Take all your chances while you can” smothered in an avalanche of impassioned violin sawing, pounding keyboards and elongated vowels, and "Half Light", an indie-by-numbers arm-waver with its sights set firmly on 2005’s festival crowds, given a hip, retro-futuristic edge by wee-wawing synths but drowned out by some dreary after-school chord-practice. The manipulative "Wires" (it’s about babies, blood, tears and Christmas) piles on the epic strings like they’re being discontinued and the urgent bathos like someone penning an episode of 'ER' very late at night.
Title track "Tourist" offers a glimpse of hope. A nice, airy, light-handed amble through the pleasures of travelling it sounds like Phoenix, or Josh Rouse, while "Trading Air"’s delicious, croissant-delicate melody recalls Coldplay’s "Parachutes".
Yet, tellingly, by far the best bits of this album occur towards the ends of "Wires" and "Yesterday Threw Everything At Me" when the mixing desk guys go for a tea break leaving Potts to sing solo into the echoey void for a minute, with nothing but an unplugged Fender for company. You can’t help thinking EMI could have saved themselves hundreds of thousands and delivered a more loveable record in the process by realising this fact.
Still, with both Keane and Snow Patrol due a year off, 2005 - with its attendant 'CD:UK' slots and broadsheet column inches - looks set to be Athlete’s. We’d still advise Britrock fans without bottomless pockets to wait for the new Elbow LP.
