Listened: Friday July 30
Hopes and Fears is a really pretty and catchy album that I enjoy, but despite that I fell out of love with Keane pretty quickly. For starters – the lyrics are inscrutable. I don’t mind the odd inscrutable song in general, but none of their songs seem to mean much of anything.
Secondly, when I saw them live, their singer, Tom, has the cheesiest performance style – his gestures and facial expressions look too unnatural and practiced. I’d much rather they look spontaneous and less perfect and “pretty”.
Thirdly, they went into the burned out rock star phase really quickly – the singer was in rehab after the first album.
All of this ended up being too cliche for me. Their second album is coming up later in the project, but after that album, they’ve fallen off my radar.
Emily's Albums A to Z 
[…] single, Good Souls. The singer has that British tenor soulful singer voice. It reminds me of James, Keane, or the […]
[…] was perhaps a bit too harsh when I reviewed Hopes and Fears. Hearing Under the Iron Sea reminds me that Keane does have a talent for lovely singing and piano […]
[…] because it was the thing to do, but I lack patience with out of control people (see Amy Winehouse, Keane), so my biases wouldn’t let me enjoy it the one or two times I tried to listen to it. […]