Athlete Albums (4)
What The Critics Say
Athlete can't quite manage to figure out what they want or what they are. Their 2003 debut, Vehicles & Animals, was a fun, poppy album that earned Athlete a Mercury prize nomination, but their sophomore effort, Tourist, moved away from the indie feel of their first record toward mainstream and network television-friendly material, and garnered the band a lot of comparisons to Coldplay. For their third record, they continue to explore the brooding, effected-guitar layering that they had previously done, pushing a little bit into the "experimental," with curvaceous instrumental lines, echoing keyboards, and a bit of electronic percussion, but Beyond the Neighbourhood is still very much an album for the mainstream. It's very cleanly produced and nothing ever gets too loud or out of place; even the distorted guitar that introduces "Second Hand Store" is controlled, blended softly into the background and melodically based, lead singer Joel Pott trying his best to find the correct amount of affected quaver and Bono/Chris Martin-inspired sentimentality needed to stir his listeners appropriately. Not that every song here is about love or one of its many guises -- "The Outsiders" contains the lyrics "Let's pick a fight on whoever we like cause we're never wrong/Nobody likes us, we don't care, so let's lose ourselves...Can you spot the English here?," while the single "Hurricane" is about, well, hurricanes ("Is it something we gotta get used to?/But we're not giving up the coastline so easily") -- but the album is mostly about emotion and expressing emotion, and finding the right driving piano hooks and reverbing guitar chords to enhance such feelings. All of which means that Beyond the Neighbourhood is not particularly extraordinary. This kind of thing has been done before (and as with the case of Coldplay, done better: catchier, more sincere, and seeming less contrived), and reinforces the idea that Athlete are still trying to decide what they want to be, and at this point, three albums in, it may be that they never quite learn what that is. ~ Marisa Brown, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Apparently damned in its home country for being just a little too much out of time -- the band is not really Brit-pop per se but has a certain amiableness about it that suggests a certain love of things from the heyday -- Athlete is perfectly, almost aggressively pleasant. "You Got the Style" might have been specifically about race riots in early 21st century Britain, but Athlete is not out to surprise, to disrupt, or to otherwise cause problems, while the band is also not "twee" as such, or emo or the like. If anything, they're doing something enjoyably relaxed enough that won't make you hate yourself, as the likes of Toploader did all too easily. Vehicles & Animals contains early singles plus more recent efforts and generally makes for a great listen on a lazy and warm afternoon -- not party music, but quietly hooky good times. Every so often something will spark up that makes a bit more sense of the Super Furry Animals and Pavement comparisons that the group has received -- the shift to electronic percussion and deep bass at the end of "One Million," the flecks of lazy semi-slacker singing from lead figure Joel Pott throughout. There's enough keyboard bubbling and arrangements throughout that suggest the group might actually benefit from going to that full-time, and while hardly reinventing them, the beat songs like "Out of Nowhere" are given a pleasant post-Beck tinge. The band's at its best when it just concentrates on doing what it likes -- "Shake Those Windows" is a winning example, where a low-key enough song suddenly shifts into a really summery chorus thanks to a grand semi-country guitar line and builds into a sweetly triumphant full-band conclusion. Even the sudden burst of a feedback-laden blast part way through "New Project" doesn't seem like a disruption of the general flow of Vehicles & Animals, and that's to its good. ~ Ned Raggett, All Music Guide
