Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 23/07/07
Label: Virgin

More reflective than their earlier two albums, "Teenager" sees The Thrills offer up an indie-pop memorial to a time of "small town girls" and "backseat fumblings", still coloured - but not to quite such an irritatingly cutesy degree - by the West Coast sensibilities with which the Dublin five-piece first rose to prominence. Leaning heavily on the mandolin - musical shorthand for sun-dappled sentimentality - and with iconic, black-and-white, Smiths-esque cover photography of snogging American teens by Joe Szabo, you can see what they're driving at: a paean to youth and innocence à la "Pet Sounds". The results are hit-and-miss.

"The Midnight Choir" is a messy, repetitive opener, which despite its questioning, "Losing My Religion"-style central riff, fails to establish from the outset the desired elegiac/reminiscent tone. "This Year" chucks a harmonica into its upbeat, air-punching mix yet again falls short of striking a truly poignant note, in some part due to vague and hackneyed lyrics such as "I know this year could be our year" and "I'm gonna lay my heart on the line". The single "Nothing Changes Round Here" is a radio-friendly backwards nod to "So Much For The City" days concerning our narrator being sought out by the town hottie - but it might just as easily be about a visit to a car showroom for all the lyrics seem to care.

Other songs have little to recommend them but their resemblance to the work of other bands: "I Came All This Way" sounds like something Evan Dando would have deleted after the first playback, while "Long Forgotten Song" is simply too indebted to The Waterboys' "Whole Of The Moon". The title track itself, meanwhile, is a weird slog. Conor Deasy's vocals don't help, being more breathy, laboured and whiney than ever - and far too much like the sound of someone succumbing to pulmonary failure for comfort.

In the end, it's their original obsession with the Beach Boys and The Byrds that saves the album, returning to the fore in "No More Empty Words" and especially the buoyant finale "There's Joy To Be Found In This Life", with its salvation-via-sunshine message, twangy Roger McGuinn guitar, pristine rising "ah-ah-aahhs" and euphoric climax.

These are inoffensive, generally well-rounded songs with moments of charm and a less corporate sound than those of many who've picked up guitars in the last four years. But it just doesn't sound like anyone here is genuinely missing, or even thinking terribly deeply about, their adolescence. Others (Morrissey, Ben Kweller and The Long Blondes, to name but three) have done the rosy-tinted, when-we-were-young thing far more movingly. Better luck with "Adult" and "Pensioner" perhaps.

    by Anna Britten