The Music is a hell of thing to name your band. There's an arrogance to it but at the same time, it's just about the least creative, least clever name you could give to a band-- especially since we've already had The Band and The The. If you're going to adopt the generic term for your chosen art form as your band's moniker you had damn well better make music that flattens the earth, because if you don't you will be easily forgotten. And those who are interested won't even be able to find you on the Internet because your handle brings up more than a million results.
Two albums in, I am not convinced that The Music will ever be a band that can transcend their stupid name. Their eponymous first album at least dabbled in eclecticism and flirted with dance rhythms and electronic textures alongside their big 70s rock riffs rock, but Welcome to the North actually narrows the band's scope, morphing the Leeds quartet into a nu-Zeppelin pop Dream Theater with a vocalist that sounds a lot like Geddy Lee or a cartoon or maybe a cartoon of Geddy Lee. In a way, The Music are lot like Oasis, in that everything they do is huge, but none of what they do is original at all. In a pinch, you could accurately describe them as a denser Red Rider.
Clearly, the band believes that working in nothing but sweeping gestures and keeping subtlety at arm's length is the quickest route to changing lives one stadium full of them at a time. There's a possibility that they're correct: The mountain-crushing riff that tears up the opening of "Freedom Fighters" certainly kicks adequate ass, but when they let you listen to this stuff for an hour, it's pretty clear that this band has nothing to say outside of platitudes and only a couple of ways to say it. Over the course of both ballads and rockers, the album is utterly monochromatic, and I can't understand how such basic hard rock can sound so dreadfully awful on headphones-- the production, courtesy of Brendan O'Brien, is hopelessly cluttered and flat given the relatively basic setup.
Guitarist Adam Nutter must have about 60 effects boxes to trip over in the studio, but were he restricted to some vacuum tube distortion and reverb he'd be three times as powerful as he is here with his overly digital, grayed-out tone. The best thing about this band is drummer Phil Jordan, whose shuffling, propulsive beats and auxiliary percussion additions save essentially every song from potential complete collapse. He's all that redeems the awful ballad "Bleed From Within", which begins as a limp U2 homage with lyrics like "The sun is bleeding into mine eye" and "When darkness falls there will be war/ I'm bleeding/ Yeah, I'm bleeding from within." The chorus, whose sole word is "burn" repeated over and over again is reasonably buoyant, but this song goes nowhere until Jordan's beat takes center stage and the rest of the band just hangs on for the ride. Vocalist Robert Harvey tries his best to ruin it with inexplicably horrendous wordless vocalizations but on an album where the band flails for gripping moments, you take what you can get.
As much as they try to break your heart and lift your downtrodden spirit, The Music really aren't up to the task, and it's a wide open question as to whether they ever will be. They have general technical proficiency and a knack for a good riff, but listening to them is nevertheless a chore-- and a boring, repetitive one at that.
