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Standard Fare - The Noyelle Beat (LP)

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Album Review

Athlete Tourist
Parlophone

Article written by Chris G
Feb 4, 2005.

Come August this album will be everywhere. On every radio station. On every television programme. In every company car and every supermarket. And the band will be huge. They’ll play the V festival and no doubt take blandness to new levels of banality. All of which makes it very tempting to attack this album like no album has ever been attacked before. Here we have a chance to club a thing of great evil in its infancy.

‘Vehicles and Animals’ was the debut effort from the band back in 2003 and it housed a fair few good songs (‘Beautiful’ for example was one of the most thoroughly wonderful songs heard that year), but was criticised for being slightly too feeble and flimsy in places. ‘Tourist’ is the return and, in a nutshell, suffers from the same problems. As an album it is weak and too full of vacuous filler, however, there are small gems within it. ‘Wires’ is inarguably a wonderful single, ‘If I Found Out’ features some quite exemplary gospel singing and ‘I Love’ really is made for beautiful summer evenings when the sky looks like it just can not get any bigger. The sound is not a progression though. The awful truth is that the duller parts of the first album have just been perfected and polished.

Of course, Athlete will never be Coldplay. Coldplay sound huge and write giant, universal songs which could fill entire counties where Athlete tend to write modest little songs with limited meaning that probably have trouble filling their own bedrooms.

No, the real potential genius of Athlete only arises when they forget the formula for a radio friendly chorus and they feel relaxed and natural. ‘Street Map’ is the closest they get to this on ‘Tourist’, Joel Pott‘s voice is not forced and the band don’t sound as if they’re trying far too hard to please. Instead, the melody is gentle and the song affecting.

You don’t need me to tell you that in circles such as these Athlete are about as ‘cool’ as Robert Kilroy-Silk. However, Athlete, despite how hard it might seem to believe come August, still have it in them to be a good band of some worth and we should all hope they are allowed to develop into that band.

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