The Fray, “Scars & Stories”(Epic)
The Fray’s latest and third record, “Scars & Stories,” is made up of 12 pop-savvy songs in 45 minutes — with bright, memorable melodies and some of the proven songwriting devices fans have come to expect from the multiplatinum Denver-based band.
The Fray is the piano-pop outfit we’ve long compared to Coldplay. And while part of that comparison still works, part of it doesn’t.
“Run For Your Life” is a song that musically tells the band’s often misunderstood story. The piano-driven melody is listenable, but it also has two personalities. Part of the lead-up to the chorus is a tired progression we’ve heard before: “You don’t have to go it alone.” But then comes the big radio hook, which really does bring you in melodically and force open your ears: “Run for your life, my love.”
The song is a natural second or third single, and it could be huge for the band. But its inconsistency won’t have everybody listening all the way through.
That said, “Scars & Stories” has much better songs. The lead single we’ve been listening to for months, “Heartbeat,” is the Fray at its best. The smart but limited harmonies. The soaring chorus. The uplifting message. It gets in your head and stays there.
“1961” is a lovely tale set against some of the record’s best melodies. Frontman Isaac Slade stretches his vocal range as his band explores the groove they’ve cemented since forming a decade ago.
The thoughtful ballad, “I Can Barely Say,” has Slade exploring some challenging, naked emotional areas, and even though it’s a dip into super-emo David Gray territory, it’s a beautiful song.
The instrumentation and production here also leave a lasting impression, especially the haunting wall of sound within “Rainy Zurich” — home to piano sonics that could easily be reinterpreted by Skrillex or Pretty Lights into a rager of an electronic anthem. Ricardo Baca, The Denver Post
Gotye, “Making Mirrors” (Samples ‘n’ Seconds/Universal Republic)
First things first: Yes, Gotye sounds a whole lot like Sting when he sings the chorus of “Somebody That I Used to Know.” That tinge of pop familiarity may have helped make the song an international hit when Gotye’s third album, “Making Mirrors,” was released last year in Australia, where he lives. Now “Making Mirrors” arrives in the United States along with Gotye himself, who is performing Monday in New York.
The album merges catchy, gizmo-loving pop constructions with a stalwartly depressive mindset. Gotye, a Belgian-Australian songwriter born Wouter De Backer, is largely a one-man studio band, playing many instruments and building songs around samples from a record collection apparently filled with vintage soul, lounge music, soundtracks and exotica.
Gotye worries about humanity destroying the planet through overconsumption in “Eyes Wide Open” and sees an entertainer’s life as a fraud in “Smoke and Mirrors.” He portrays himself as a boyfriend who’s more self-absorbed than sensitive; he apologizes for being “wrapped up in myself” in “Giving Me a Chance,” while in “Somebody That I Used to Know,” after he moans about his ex shutting him out, the ex (portrayed by Kimbra) shows up to remind him about “all the times you screwed me over.”
When he does find love, he is desperately needy. The exuberant Motown beat in “I Feel Better” only pulls him partway out of the despair he keeps returning to in the verses; “Save Me” extols the lover who eases his suicidal anxiety.
But his snappy pop constructions fight the moping. There’s the perky little xylophone line in “Somebody That I Used to Know,” the jazzy electric-piano sample that circles through “Smoke and Mirrors,” the galloping beat and floating guitars of “Eyes Wide Open,” the way “In Your Light” meshes hand-clapping, guitar-strumming folk-pop with booping electropop. The album’s one wholeheartedly joyful song is “State of the Art,” full of pitch-shifted praises of an electric home organ that has built-in drumbeats and simulated choir — a gizmo supreme. People may let Gotye down, and vice versa, but the gadgets never do. Jon Pareles, The New York Times
