The Bravery

by

The Bravery

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...everybody else this year. I was talking to a hot rock'n'roll chick of a certain age (totally married, as am I) the other night, both of us expressing guarded pleasure in the fact that it sounds like 1981 on all the most "cutting edge" stations. I expressed my affection for Interpol, and she asked "aren't they the ones who sound like Gang of Four?" I told her I thought she was thinking of Franz Ferdinand. Interpol sounds like Joy Division. The Strokes sound like the Buzzcocks. The Killers sound like (early) Duran Duran. LCD Soundsystem (usually) sound like The Fall. The Moving Units (often) sound like New Order. New Order is even starting to sound like New Order again, except when they sound like Joy Division.

And the Bravery? Sound like the Killers, and the singer sounds rather way too much like Robert Smith (of The Cure, in case you're 19 or living under a rock), which is a good thing since I wonder how much longer Mr. Smith will be able to manage it hiimself. Despite that--and the fact that track two of The Bravery sounds almost actionably close to track two on The Killers' debut, Hot Fuss, as if it were like a pastiche or something... :o)--it's tons of fun.

While it has nothing in my mind to rival the sheer, jump-around-your-attic-in-your-boxers-playing-air-guitar quality of say, Mr. Brightside or Somebody Told Me (by The Killers, just in case you're 40 or living under a rock), I can see myself growing to like the album as a whole more than Hot Fuss, as I find it less pretentious, forced, and calculated.

RECOMMENDED, but really kids, if you don't have any music by the artists who created this sound the first time around, go buy some; it's all remastered and sounds great all over again. Yes, dance music is ALLOWED to have guitars AND live drums. No, there is no way you can have bass guitar as your lead instrument and a vocalist who sounds like Ian Curtis and then complain when people say you sound like Joy Division. And maybe I'm only so excited by the post-punk/synthpop revival because it sounds like what music sounded like when I first started to care. There are worse reasons to like something. Crotchety old guy in his early thirties lecture over. Buy this. And The Killers. And Interpol. And Franz Ferdinand. Etc.

(3 & 1/2 stars) Since the Amazon description of this CD is so UNinformative, here's my contribution. In their sound, The Bravery owes something to Depeche Mode, the Faint, and a bit to New Order. The lead singer Sam Endicott's voice has something of a "hysterical tenor" Robert Smith quality. Their songs are electronic dance-rock. Just as one example, track 4, "Tyrant," mixes a Deep Purple-ish heavy rock organ with a pulsating synth line a la early Depeche Mode (Speak and Spell era) and then a quasi-catchy melody vocal by Endicott. The song is one of the better ones on the self-titled Bravery CD, but unfortunately there is an overall lack of distinguishable songwriting on the disc. The songs do tend to sound "all the same." I say this after 2.5 times thru the CD. Continuing the Depeche Mode comparison, there's nothing on this that rivals even 2nd-tier DM. The CD contains the promise of better things in the future, but nothing much stands out on this debut.