Athlete - not ordinary students of Sentimentology

No more chances taken, no surprises in pop-culture anymore? If your taste buds have been worn out by the repetitious and tedious flogging of TV-mules upon our [once sacred] singles charts, then check you seatbelt - because Athlete are here with their sophomore album, ‘Tourist’.

It is a rather stunning follow up to their debut, Mercury Music Prize nominated, disc 'Vehicles And Animals' and it ain’t just propaganda. Although the fans will find it a bit puzzling that the band has migrated from their quirky pop to the territory Coldplay have made their own but Keane and Snow Patrol are also deploying admirably.

Still, saying that - this is not a downer release, just the opposite. Athlete have found in themselves a romantic streak that is really disarming; their balladry takes you unawares and holds you captive until the dying notes of ‘I Love’. This set of songs is more of an emotional rather than the factual tourism… [The band, for geographically inclined readers, hails from Deptford.]

Opening softly with ‘Chances’, it melodically takes you into its emotional world where heartaches, soul-suffering and melancholy are turned into something so largely deep, so monumentally intimate, so basically human, to wonder aloud - how could have I managed survival for so long without this?

Piano driven tracks that are sung like monolithic slices of pop-drama, orchestrated to perfection. It gets rockier on ‘Half Light’ but only slightly, as this is a journey that actually deals in well- to overdone sentimentology but Athlete manage to sound sincere even when repeatedly plead ‘Just wanna be with you, my baby’ on the title cut…

‘Wires’ has already become the band’s most successful domestic single [#3, no less] and there are several contenders for more hits, from ‘Trading Air’, ‘If I Found Out’, the unbearably gorgeous ‘Street Map’ or the epically remarkable ‘Twenty Four Hours’… ‘Tourist’ is richly sounding but arranged in simpler, more direct manner.

What it ain’t is - a ‘crowd-kissing’ CD; whether masses will take this change of direction to their collective heart is anybody’s bet, we applaud it.

8/10

Tour dates:

03 March - University Students Union, Leeds
04 March - Carling Academy, Glasgow
05 March - University, Manchester
06 March - University, Newcastle u. Tyne
08 March - LCR at University of East Anglia, Norwich
09 March - Rock City, Nottingham
10 March - Carling Academy, Birmingham
12 March - Cardiff University, Cardiff
13 March - Carling Academy, Bristol
14 March - Kentish Town Forum, London