Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 27/08/06
Label: V2

As the title might suggest, The Dears sixth studio album is enthralled to the politically correct raincoat-wearing '80s: shades of The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen and U2 are all conspicuous by their presence. More contemporary influences would include Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Snow Patrol and Blur (particularly Murray Lightburn's flat-vowelled vocal, which is more than a tad reminiscent of Damon Albarn), but ultimately this is a band that takes the bedroom poetry of Morrissey and weds it to the widescreen soundscapes of The Edge. For a band from Montreal it's a strange and alluring combination.

Amid the keyboard and guitar-led dramatics, references to liberal guilt, self-loathing and general party-of-me isolation abound. Certainly, Lightburn has the turn of phrase of a bed-sit poet ("I hang with all the pariahs", he croons on "Ticket To Immortality"; and "being born is such a chore…" on "There Goes My Outfit" is pure "Hatful Of Hollow") while his band mates, including wife Natalia Yanchak, are able to hit the buttons marked "dramatic", "crescendo" "grandiose" and "sweeping". If you can fault The Dears for anything, it's not a lack of sonic ambition. Opening track "Sinthro" and "I Fell Deep" in particular, would be suitably ambitious enough to inspire lighter / mobile phone waving if they ever progress to stadiums.

There's no dearth of memorable tunes either. "Death Or Life We Wants You" has Lightburn crying, "Nobody wants you, but we want you" like a demented David Koresh through a vocoder; "Hate Then Love" combines mid-'70s David Bowie (is that Carlos Alomar on guitar?) with The Psychedelic Furs circa "Pretty In Pink"; "Ballad Of Humankindness" has some gorgeous Beatle-esque key changes; and "Whites Only Party" tackles racism ("we ain't here to steal your women, at least that wasn't the plan…") against the counterpoint of a jaunty descending keyboard riff.

Best of all is "Fear Makes The World Go Round" - a big show-stopping epic of falsetto, widdly axe work and church organ reminiscent of Pink Floyd or Radiohead. "There is no doubt that they've got guns in their hands, cos the whole world lives in fear," croons a dread-stricken Lightburn, in a lyric that may or not be directed at American foreign policy,

That sounds like a lot of comparisons, but The Dears stamp enough of their own personality to make this one of the best and most vital alternative US albums of 2006. Perhaps that "gang of losers" tag is slightly ironic, because dig deep and there's plenty of gold medals here.

    by Adam Webb