Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 23/03/09
Label: V2

Even around the peak of debut album "Capture/Release", London quartet The Rakes never rose above UK indie's second tier. Their precise guitar attack, while manful and gilded with the occasional earworm, lacked the personality of their peers - Bloc Party's emotional volatility, the intensely focused vignettes of The Libertines' kinship or the tightrope precision of The Futureheads' debut. The Rakes only ever seemed to need one string to their bow, though - their strength lay in efficiency, the conjuring of memorable pop that would take hold even if it only took three minutes to play and just a touch longer to record.

Unfortunately, third album "Klang!" seems to abandon even that trait. There's nothing here as immediate as back catalogue stand-outs "Binary Love", "Ausland Mission", "Strasbourg" or "We Danced Together" - the only contender is second track "That's The Reason", with its trebly guitar doodles and sing-it-back chorus. It's the song that should have introduced "Klang!", with a sense of purpose absent from opener "You're In It". Shuffling queasily between Blondie's "One Way Or Another" and The Specials' "Little Bitch", it lets down lead singer Alan Donohoe, whose anxious croon seems to work better when flailing amid a focused song structure.

It would be unfair to dismiss the record completely, however, as there are definite highlights. Mid-album pair "The Woes Of The Working Women" and "1989" show glimpses of The Rakes as we know them, Donohoe's wailing somewhere between lecherous uncle and worried aunt. A refrain in next track "Shackleton" offers some clue as to the singer's concern - "We're all pawns in someone else's business plan". For a band who have spent most of their time soundtracking the fortunes of working men and women in the city, the current plight of London's Square Mile must bring bigger bother than a mounting alcohol problem or the next-day guilt of illicit inter-office affairs.

From an artistic viewpoint, you'd think it'd bring bigger interest too - but then The Rakes, tired of the "dull" London music scene, relocated to Berlin to record "Klang!" in a building formerly used as a radio broadcast centre by the East German government. It was a move that makes sense for a band prone to betraying their love of '70s Bowie, but one that doesn't seem to have resulted in any major shift in direction. And, with those aforementioned peers either floundering or falling around them, you'd have to put "Klang!" down as a missed opportunity. It's the desire to see them do something interesting as much as earlier form that makes you hope they stick around to take advantage of the next one.

    by Kev Kharas