Thirteen Senses - Crystal Sounds Album Review

In an era where creativity has become a cipher for switching musical gears at will, Thirteen Senses third album Crystal Sounds represents nothing short of a gamble. Unceremoniously dropped by Mercury after the commercial failure of 2007's Contact, it's taken four years for the quartet to resurface, practically an ice age in musical terms and also a period that saw the last vestiges of the early noughties sincerity-based stadium rock being swept away.

Self produced, self released and delayed by over a year following completion, traumas such as this would've impacted most bands, maybe you'd imagine sparking a re-evaluation of whether people were still receptive to the sort of melodic brand of higher brow pop that earned them a gold disc for their debut album Into The Fire. We're intrigued to report however that if any soul searching has gone on during this album's lengthy gestation period, the conclusion it would appear was unquestionably to keep calm and carry on.

This approach has produced a collection of songs which play very much to Thirteen Senses strengths - single The Loneliest Star is a soaring example of arena rock-lite for grownups, as accomplished as it is simple - but also underlines in bold their lack of progression. Singer Will South's atonal voice has always had something of a piping, Marmite quality to it, whilst diehard fans bristle at comparisons to Keane, Coldplay and Snow Patrol. It's a vocal delivery unchanged here, but a range of the basic tools used by all of their historic peers to great effect are much in evidence, particularly the use of strong piano melody lines, waves of reverb and a tendency to use a wall of sound approach to mixing. Inevitably, this means that there are places - many of them - where Crystal Sounds is practically indistinguishable from either of its predecessors.

All of this criticism might seem churlish, given that much of what constitutes the rock landscape is usually cyclical, lazy renaissance heaped upon lazy renaissance. It's equally true to say that there are some songs here, particularly Imagine Life and I Saw Stars Disappear, which deserve greater exposure than they're likely to receive. But this misses the point. No matter how much an audience loves their artist, they don't deserve to be treated to the same recipe served a dozen different ways. Crystal Sounds sees its creators at a cross roads, if only they could see it.


Andy Peterson