Razorlight: Slipaway Fires


It's often said that music doesn't divide into genres, that there is only good music and bad. There is one more operational subdivision: big music and its opposite. As a scurvyish guitar band, Razorlight started out making the latter. Their taut, pavement-level debut, Up All Night, jangled and rolled, its dilated pupils gazing up at past stars of the gutter like Lou Reed and Bob Dylan. Then, you could bump into singer Johnny Borrell in some east London dive. He was ambitious but still stitched into the parochial scenester life.

Two albums on, with a US hit, 'America', under their belts, Live8 at their feet and Hollywood starlets notched up on bedposts, Razorlight have turned their coats. Their third album still bears traces of Borrell's previous incarnation as a lowlife hipster but Razorlight have found stadiums to their liking. They have discovered their inner Celtic bluster and made a record so big and gusty that it could usefully be hooked up the National Grid.

'Wire To Wire' sets the pace, a piano ballad that piles on the backing vocals as Borrell howls some elliptical guff about love. It's followed by 'Hostage of Love', whose urgent strumming underlines some of Borrell's vastest vocals yet. 'Now like a madman, I give my laurels to you,' he bellows. Sentiments like that abound. Written in the Inner Hebrides, Borrell's lyric sheet aims for the poetry of cosmic Celts like the Waterboys but ends up sounding more like Joshua Tree-era U2. Commercially, it works. Artistically, though, it's hard not to snigger.

Borrell is sharper when writing his snarky, observational knockabouts. Slipaway Fires harbours a trio of these - 'Tabloid Lover', 'North London Trash', a caustic celebration of the boy Borrell used to be, and 'Burberry Blue Eyes', a prurient tale of posh girls slumming it with guys like Johnny.

The closest Borrell gets to what he used to aspire to is '60 Thompson', a Leonard Cohen homage that hints Borrell might have internal organs, not just ego, under his ribs. But that feeling soon dissipates as 'The House' deploys pianos, dead fathers and bathos in a stab at immortality. It misses.

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