Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 19/06/06
Label: SonyBMG

For a genre concerned with wide open spaces and the broad sweep of emotions, the landscape of Epic Indie is getting mighty crowded these days. With all the post-Radiohead bands (Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Keane, Athlete, Starsailor etc), and the likes of Richard Ashcroft pumping out the Big Commercial Music on one hand, and the post-Joy Division bands (Editors, Interpol et al), taking up the dark emotive wing on the other, it's getting hard to move for bands with grand chord sequences and a neat patter in universal lyricism. Need a sensitive indie boy to "fix you"? No problem: just consult Yellow Pages.

When Hope Of The States first emerged in 2003, they were an exciting prospect. Recognisable yes (essentially bits of Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Radiohead spot-welded together), but their songs fizzed with enough emotional charge to make you feel that this was something fresh, something inspiring. Three years and lots of Epic Indie later, the band return with a crucial misstep - not a bold leap into the unknown, but a consolidation. A record that inches towards the mainstream with those sell-able, but now over familiar elements pushed to the fore - big choruses, vague, universal sentiments, blah de blah de blah.

Not that this is a bad record. Seven out of ten is a respectable, if average score. But as exhilarating as it all may seem on the surface, there's little here that we haven't heard before. The surging, sometimes symphonic style of their first album is still very much in evidence - "Bonfire" pitches the text book loud-quiet build to perfection while "This Is A Question" and "Blood Meridian" shake their fist at the sky in a similarly impassioned yet well-worn fashion. As for the lyrical concerns (finding sanity, optimism and solidarity as the world crumbles around you), they too remain unchanged. Like Coldplay before them, HOTS have remade their first album for a wider market.

It's just a shame that Editors beat them to it by seven months. "Sing It Out" takes on them on at the driving, accessible, moody indie game and comes off with a bloody nose - again, not that it's a bad song, but someone else is currently doing this far better. The constant repetition of their chief lyrical idea, meanwhile - "You are not alone / You are lost and now you're found"; "Let nobody tell you your heart was wrong"; "Despite it all we're doing alright / our friends by our side we fight a good fight" - rapidly begins to grate, setting in the Epic Indie's worst fear: sensitivity fatigue. Take away the empathy and these bands are scuppered.

Ironically, the moments that work the best are the tiniest the little tinkles of xylophone, the softer approach of - "The Good Fight", the angelic sigh towards the end of "Little Silver Birds". But even more ironically, for a band with real tragedy in its recent history, this is all too woolly and impersonal, a stab for success and universality when they should have been facing up to difficult questions. Still a band to pin your hopes on then, but not quite yet the group you'd hope they'd be.

    by Ian Watson