Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 06/11/06
Label: Island

When McFly's previous album came out a year ago, their pop zest was much needed in a drab time of Powters, Blunts and Grays, and it was easy to overlook the fact it was just a competent album. Sadly (for them) 2006 has turned out to be an absolutely vintage pop year, with acts as wildly varied as Hot Chip, The Feeling, Nelly Furtado, Sugababes, Muse and My Chemical Romance storming the charts with soaring melodies and monster choruses. It's all become so exciting that who cares if Irish troubadour Damien Rice has again reared his ugly head?

Amidst such a feast of delights, the dreadfully titled "Motion In The Ocean" doesn't quite hit the spot in the same way. Unfair, perhaps, because it's a sturdy effort and has obviously been crafted with passion, energy and (whisper it) expert musicianship. The choppy riffs, lavish pianos, rolling drums and lush waves of harmonies suggest the four-piece have been listening closely to Queen. Sadly, the production is piled so high the tunes often get a little lost.

Not that you'd know it from the excellent three opening tracks. The stadium sized "We Are The Young" boasts almost as many choruses as its five writers, while "Please Please" (a strangely sarcastic ode to celebrity sick note Lindsay Lohan) is full on, top down FM rock. And then there's single "Star Girl" with its mother-baiting anal sex references, sugar rush harmonies and peculiarly Mansun-like refrain.

After this, things get considerably patchy. There's the pointless photocopy of Freddie Mercury's "Don't Stop Me Now" (a song no-one needs to hear again), the limp Monkees pastiche of "Little Joanna" and the absolutely awful strumalong "Walk In The Sun", with its grab-a-cliché lyrics (they "feel so high", they're "following the road"). When the songwriting is this weak, the souped-up production just draws attention to it. Still, thank God they've resisted the temptation to turn into the Arctic Monkeys, the old Steptoes of teen pop.

McFly still always choose silly over surly, as best witnessed on the marvellously odd "Transylvania", which mystifyingly throws Ann Boleyn and Frankenstein into Dracula's home country and tries to extract a life metaphor from the mess. Ludicrous stuff, with its silly vocal effects and lurching structure, but oddly addictive. For moments of devil may care pop fun like this, "Motion In The Ocean" is impossible to dislike.

    by Jaime Gill