Two months after Ian Curtis died, Bono stopped by the desk of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson and said something like, "Now he's gone, I promise you I'll do it for him." At least that's what Wilson later told critic Simon Reynolds. U2 soldiered on without Joy Divison's gothy glamor, and of course Bono wasn't the only one carrying an unforgettable fire for Curtis. Then and since, a long list of bands have tried fusing U2's stadium-size grandiosity with Joy Division's bleak foreboding. Sometimes they're Radiohead, sometimes they're Interpol, and sometimes they're White Lies.
The most relevant current comparison is probably Glasvegas, another UK band groomed early on for success, only to release a disappointingly ponderous debut album. Except where Glasvegas' roots in girl-group, JAMC, and early Creation bands amounted to an Exciting New Direction in the beleaguered British indie scene, White Lies have been striking the usual post-punk moves ever since a pair of Stephen Street-produced singles in 2006, back when they were called Fear of Flying. White Lies' debut To Lose My Life... recently entered the UK charts at #1 and combines prose-purple darkness with rafters-shooting arena rock. It's better than Elefant, worse than the Stills, nearly on par with Editors-- which in the English rock press these days assures descriptors like "classic" and "masterpiece."
Produced by Ed Buller (Pulp, Suede) and Max Dingel (the Killers, Glasvegas), and boasting melodramatic accompaniment by a 20-piece orchestra, To Lose My Life... can't be faulted in terms of tightness or radio-ready polish. If you liked the new Oasis and U2 records, never bought Turn on the Bright Lights, and tend to ignore clumsy lyrics, you might enjoy raising your beer to this album just fine. Hell, the hummable Cars-esque new wave at the bridge of dour opening track "Death" is just what you needed if you're willing to forget "Just What I Needed". But White Lies know beer is really more for staring at glumly: "Everything has got to be love or death," singer/guitarist Harry McVeigh declares.
Why not both? "Let's grow old together and die at the same time," the title track urges, certainly not the last time someone will rewrite the Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" by way of the Modern Lovers' "Dignified and Old", crank up the bombast, and leave out all pathos, personality, and charm. White Lies' flirtations with mortality certainly don't help their drab tunes. "If you tell me to jump then I'll die," goes the galloping "E.S.T."; "As you said goodbye, I almost died," the weepy "Nothing to Give" adds. But their rote cheerlessness suggests no such emotional intensity. As McVeigh sings on POW-invoking sub-Joshua Tree ballad "Fifty on Our Foreheads", "All we heard was lies about the truth." Right, as opposed to the other kind of lies.
White Lies could even get away with a little heavy-handed somberness if anything of their own (other than unintentional humor) shone through their reconstituted gloom-rock. A little less death, a little more love-- of creativity, of life in all its urgent particulars rather than just the hand-me-down cliches that stand in for them-- would go a long way. Take "Unfinished Business", where gothic organs, Interpol-like phrasing, and a jarring James Bond allusion convey little other than that White Lies own a few critically acclaimed records and probably know who Roger Moore is. "Love and death are always on my mind," the Stills sang back in 2003. In other words, White Lies are boring and stuff.
