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Every now and then, a small flotilla of deliciously sweet and cherub guided indie bands bestowed with angelic vocalists, cyclic guitar hooks and swirls of crafted gems detailing achy breaky despair come along and cause a stir, dispersing concentric ripples across the surface of current musical mediocrity and homogeneity.
It last happened when bands going by the names of Haven, Thirteen:13 and Lowgold came to the fore with their raft of gorgeous and instantly likeable offerings; ‘Say Something’, Truth Hurts’ and ‘Mercury’ respectively. Songs of merit that led a small conglomeration of cells to converge inside the body of the UK Top40 charts and impart but a bruise of temporary discomfort to the poptastic way of life.
Of course these niche ships three have since sunk without a trace and their collective ripples subsided, leaving a calm, commercial pool of bands created by the Sea Monster Cowell. That is until now, when like your proverbial London Bus, three more come along. The swell, swells. The commotion, commotes and the effeminate former choir boys sing. 2006 will see albums from The Feeling, Four Day Hombre and presently, from Morning Runner.
You may have heard of these chaps as the support act of choice for Stadium Galacticos Coldplay and Embrace. As a result you may have dismissed them as another run of the mill (Its fun to pun!) indielite by numbers bunch. Churlishness is the prerogative of fools!
With ‘Wilderness is Paradise Now’ , Morning Runner offer an ultimately mixed bag of an LP, a mix of already realised vast auditorium fillers and big tunes that carry instantaneous punches onto the memory, with great catchy melodies as found in ‘Be All You Want Me To Be’.
Having taken the slow and steady route of releasing a handful of singles and an EP, they have created with patience, a feverish sense of anticipation and avoided the rush of blood to the head route of a one big hit single release, like a whale in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lost, confused and popular for fifteen minutes before it dies a very public death of not knowing what to do next.
It is very much apparent that MR are collectively involved in the song writing process. The considered instrumentation of ‘Burning Benches’ is a testament to this. A brooding piece of tortured build up which ultimately ends up frantic and bursting with lovely cascades of organised random chaos.
THAT vocal, the half oh-so-close to broken vocal projection and half packet of Halls Soothers that has been modelled on that of The Cure’s Robert Smith is the key to the MR sound. Part sandpaper in its coarse and grating uneasiness but with a syrupy underbelly which takes it away from the finger nails down the blackboard end of the annoying spectrum, only time will tell whether the vocal will, as distinctive as it is, become irksome or suitably palatable.
The frenzied and ridiculously instantaneous ‘Gone Up in Flames’ is a perfect piece of verbalised confusion of something going wrong and deviating from the path of expectation. “Oh no, this isn’t happening” Such a declaration of helplessness is true of many situations in life where we don’t quite get what we want or when the relationship that makes so much sense to one out of the two breaks down with little reason or justification. Poignant and expressed with such reckless abandon.
While MR are by no means a life changing band and wont become part of your regularly revisited record collection in the same way your favourite Idlewild album or Postal Service LP finds itself never more than 10 CDs away. It certainly sits nicely alongside other comfortable listens for when the mood suits, like the first Embrace album or the last Snowpatrol release.
Reviewed by James Ainsworth
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