★★
The Temper Trap’s third album offers some surprises.
The musical interlude in ‘Alive’ reveals sour bass bouncing through metronomic hand claps; a cascading, glitchy drone ends ‘Fall Together’; and the minute-long instrumental outro to ‘Summer’s Almost Gone’ pushes a synth choir around an electronic beat. Barring these nifty little trinkets, Thick As Thieves sounds like ten variations of the one song.
I say ten and not 11 because closing track ‘Ordinary World’ is by far the most interesting, with Yellow Submarine-esque megaphone vocals dangling in silence to an abrupt end. But by the time the band members let their hair down to experiment among the incessantly stomping drums, it’s too late.
As expected, hi-hat-heavy dance beats and atmospheric delay pedals form the nucleus of this album. Synth pads and sawtooth keys fill most tracks, with plenty of build-ups to spoon-feed the anthemic choruses. It’s fine, just not very interesting. The trite “woah-oh”s in ‘So Much Sky’ and lyrics “Nothing in the world can tear us apart” in ‘Lost’ are sure to close many Australian TV finales to come.
You can’t really give The Temper Trap cheek for making a bunch of clean, catchy, emotional pop songs. But there’s nothing exciting to discuss here. They’re just songs.
The Temper Trap’sThick As Thievesis out now on Liberation.
