Like it or not, a lot of today's mainstream rock acts are resurrecting the lost art of the concept album to surprising degrees of success. While old staples like Nine Inch Nails or Red Hot Chili Peppers spiced up their recent twilight albums with the respective themes of apocalypse and love-via-music, newer groups have embraced the concept album to the point of self-reinvention. Take My Chemical Romance-- whose Welcome to the Black Parade LP's affinity for Queen-sized riffs and glam-rock pomp raised many elitists' eyebrows-- making Top 40 music more intriguing for an indie contingent long nauseated by the Linkin Parks and Nickelbacks of the world.
Then there's the Killers, the synth-rock monoliths inexorably linked to Brooklyn parasites the Bravery. Although Hot Fuss served as the nefarious stem cell to the seemingly hundreds of new wave/post-punk revivalist clones-- the Bravery included-- Brandon Flowers & co. risked alienating their fanbase by swapping 80s icons on Sam's Town, replacing airy Duran Duran electro-pop with stone-washed Bruce Springsteen ethos. No matter how many prefabricated altercations Flowers and Bravery frontman Sam Endicott want to engage in, the latter can't deny his debt to the former: The Bravery's self-titled debut flourished in the new-wave niche carved out by the Killers. Unsurprisingly, the band now appears at a loss for a next move on their follow-up, The Sun and the Moon, jilted by a dance-rock scene that's grown less and less forgiving with every soulless, four-on-the-floor wannabe anthem.
To understand what a failure of a record this is, you have to consider the few redeeming qualities of the band's self-titled debut. Despite its shameless Cure copping, "An Honest Mistake" left open the possibility of the band becoming a jaded, Americanized Franz Ferdinand, while "Fearless" and "No Brakes" flashed subtler, smarter synth and basslines than nearly anything on Hot Fuss. However, seeking to now eschew their blatant touchstones, the band strips down to a more guitar-based mush not beholden to any one or two specific influences, but remains shockingly unoriginal nonetheless.
Modern rock fixture Brendan O'Brien mans the boards here, spackling the band's sound with as much fluff and plastic as his early 90s records had grunge and feedback. First single "Time Won't Let Me Go" candy-coats Endicott's slit-wrist pathos, wrapping sunny organs and Coldplay-style reverb riffs around the frontman as he bitches about how dreary life was before he became a fabulous rock star: "I never had a summer of '69/ Never had a Cherry Valance of my own/ All these precious moments you promised me would come in time."
As annoying as Endicott's mascara-tainted bellyaching was on the Bravery's debut, his histrionics-for-the-masses commandeer the group's stylistic direction on The Sun and the Moon, cheapening already trite regurgitations of Robert Smith confessionals by bloating them to anthemic proportions. "Every Word Is a Knife in My Ear", an utterly unsexy, castrated version of "Take Me Out", wouldn't even be plausible as a sticker on a goth teenager's bookbag-- let alone as a relatable relationship grievance. Even worse, "Tragedy Bound"-- the album's stab at a tearjerking, showstopping acoustic ballad amidst a barrage of smug one-liners and putdowns-- follows the traditional Britpop formula for lamenting female depravity, right down to Endicott occasionally lapsing into a mopey British accent.
There was a time when the most desperate of NME apostles could argue that the Bravery had simply been victims of indie elitists' version of McCarthyism. After all, Razorlight, the Killers, and any number of other hacks hailed as part of a dance-rock revolution by the notorious British tabloid had heated purists' blood to a boiling point, practically guaranteeing the Bravery as DOA when their debut hit. However, The Sun and the Moon-- an album content to find hooks with the least resistance, to place the last 10 years of indie rock in a blender, and try to foist that gruel as something novel, to offend the very art of rock'n'roll-- vindicates even those extremists who practically urged to blacklist this band. Have you no sense of decency, Bravery?
