The recipe for chart-topping Britpop these days seems fairly straightforward: start with a rock ballad, mix in lyrics about restless hearts and rolling meadows sung in a lilting falsetto by a northern golden boy, add layer upon layer of symphonic string arrangements, a sprinkle of piano here, a dash of plucked guitar there, and voila! See you at the Reading Festival, mate! Starsailor (the name comes from the Tim Buckley LP) revels in all of these romantic pretensions on Silence Is Easy, their melodramatic, overproduced, but not altogether unpleasant sophomore release.
The new album covers a lot of the same territory as their platinum-selling 2001 debut, Love Is Here: Like any self-respecting English bard, singer/guitarist James Walsh piles-on references to clear skies, sunshine, cafes, rising seas, and a-love-that-will-somehow-find-a-way, which compliment the maudlin orchestral overtones on much of the album. Defiantly sappy, Silence Is Easy survives mostly on Walsh's oddly graceful singing. Unfortunately, the music on the whole is prosaic, even boring at times. It just sweeps right past you, like an unnoticed breeze.
The release of the un-Spectorized Let It Be...Naked on Tuesday made abundantly clear the sort of havoc that Phil Spector can wreak on an album. And while only two of the tracks on Silence Is Easy were produced by the gun-toting maniac, his presence is palpable on the entire record. The song "Telling Them", for instance, starts out decently enough, with Walsh sounding like a young Robert Plant over Barry Westhead's piano playing and Ben Byrne's punctual drumming. But, thanks no doubt to Spector's influence, the band is quickly overtaken by a cello and some accompanying strings that work themselves into a sentimental lather worthy of a Rob Reiner film. "Fidelity", too, has the makings of a nice rock song, with cutting, tumultuous guitars and a catchy chorus. But it also feels too careful, too deliberate and fussed over to have a genuinely cathartic effect, and the overwrought harmonies bury the track before it's had a chance to live.
Walsh sounds alternately like Thom Yorke, Neil Young, Chris Martin and Jeff Buckley, though he isn't a smidgen of the songwriter that any of them are (or were). His lyrics prove him incapable of understatement (a problem that apparently doesn't afflict him in conversation: "I think some of the last record sounded overwrought in parts," he said recently about Love Is Here). On Silence Is Easy, Walsh recycles truisms about love, sex, hate and co-dependance without any insights or significant lessons to add. Of course, few songwriters have anything consistently new to say, but in the course of an album, a song or two should catch you in a way that makes you sit up and say, "Yep." Walsh isn't quite there yet.
"Four to the Floor" opens with a hip-hop beat and a funk bassline, but is soon engulfed by more strings, which promptly crowd out the other instruments. What at first sounds like the soundtrack to a 70s film car chase is instead a pathetically crafted metaphor for, what else, but the thrill of new love. "Four to the Floor, I was sure that you would be my girl," Walsh sings lamely. This is the point in the album where you might start thinking, "C'mon, man, fucking pull yourself together! Enough with the chicks already!"
Despite these myriad complaints, Silence Is Easy actually has its share of tolerable moments. Walsh is undoubtedly talented and his songs can be endearing even in their shameless mushiness. Give him some time to shake off this Phil Spector phase (he'll ruin you like a diseased whore, Walsh!) and who knows how he'll develop musically. For now, silence would be better.
